INSTRUCTIONS:  Open the file "bodysize.pz3" and immediately save the figure in your library in the "character: Characters-Female" category under the name "absolute."  If you wish, you may replace the "absolute.rsr" file created by Poser with the "absolute.rsr" file included in this archive. (The .rsr file is a thumbnail of a head shot similar to the other characters in the Characters-Female library.)  

After some serious thought, I decided to include the "bodysize.pz3" file and remove the "absolute.cr2" file from this archive.  Since the "bodysize.pz3" file includes the Absolute Zero character at her default settings in frame 1, it seemed redundant to also include the .cr2 file and waste download time and server space.

I figured I'd feel bad for just uploading something that any serious Poser user can perform in about 20 minutes--removing unused or unusable morph targets from the Poser 4 female figure (although it should have took less time to download this archive than it would to delete the MTs through the Hierarchy Editor) so I included a couple of things that I use in shaping figures: the "bodysize.pz3" file and four sample "character morphs."

The "bodysize.pz3" file is a 30 frame file that starts out with a female of default Poser proportions (about 8 and a half "heads" high) in the first frame and scales down to a female of fairly average proportions (a little over 7 heads high) at frame 30.  You should be able to provide a variety of body shapes for your poser characters from the frames (2 through 29) in between.  Find a shape that you like, and begin building your characters from there.

The "character morphs" ("Susan_chest.obj", "Susan_head.obj", "Tina_chest.obj", and "Tina_head.obj") are provided fo experimental purposes.  They are combinations of various body shape morphs for the head and chest.  They illustrate morphs that define a character's face and chest as a whole, rather than using a lot of morphs to affect small portions of a particular body part.  (Note: "Character Morphs" should be used for streamlining the final product, not for actually forming your characters)

And last, but not least, Absolute Zero (absolute.cr2) is designed to be the ultimate default character. She's basically a blank slate for Poser character creation.  She has no facial feature morphs (i.e. fuller lips, round face, jaw strength, flat nose, etc.) or body shaping morphs (smaller breasts, hero hips, etc.)  The only morphs she does retain are for expression and lipsynching.

Why?

For several reasons: All of which seemed to manifest themselves within the span of a weekend, I'll give you three.

1.) Problems with using third party Poser 4 poses:  Using poses from a third party project?  Expect the unexpected.  By applying poses to Ms. Zero, and resaving them, you can filter out a number of surprise resettings of character specific morph targets.  This keeps your character's breasts from suddenly doubling in size, or from losing ethnic and facial shape settings when you apply a pose from someone who has the same morphs and their parameter dials set to other values.  (The other option is to use the "Stick Figure" character supplied with Poser, but I'd rather my .rsr files have a more "human" representation of the poses I'm saving.)

2.) Character preservation:  Downloadable characters are crammed with unused morph settings. Unless the "authors" of these files are encouraging users to continue to tweak their finished projects, the less morphs appied to a character, the better.

Suggestion: The best solution would be to combine specific morphs into one part applicable "character morph": reducing several morphs at creator defined settings (i.e. flat_nose.obj, full_lips.obj, wide_eyes.obj, etc) into one character morph for individual body parts like (Rene_face.obj or Annie_chest.obj)   

3.) Smaller files:  Although you still need the individual morph targets to actually define the figure while you're creating it, remember that each facial morph target--whether it applies changes to the lips, eyes, nose, or ears--runs about 450 K and usually contains information for the entire head. Fewer morphs make leaner character files and smaller downloads (and uploads).

Note: Apply the example "character morphs" (Susan_chest.obj, Susan_head.obj, Tina_chest.obj, and Tina_head.obj) to the Absolute Zero figure (preferably not at the same time) to get an idea of what I'm suggesting.  The Susan and Tina obj files are a combination of several morph files on the Poser 4 content disk and Traveller's head and chest morphs.  The result is a single morph file that defines the character's body part when it's parameter value is set to 1.000.

I hope these files are useful in lightening some of the heavy RAM burdens that we endure with Poser 4.

If you have any complaints, suggestions, improvements, or more graceful methods of body shaping and reducing memory requirements for figures, let me know at McCritical@aol.com

AMc