When you think of Poser dials, the first things that come to mind are either posing or morphing - but wait - there is more!
One of the most underused features in Poser/DS is body scaling. In simple words, just get a figure with no morphs, and select a body group and play with the scale, scaleX, scaleY and scaleZ dials. Now select another body group and repeat the process until you get a new body shape. We can change the body proportions, like the length of the arms and legs, or even the torso. We can make the arms and legs thicker or thinner. We can make the waist narrower and the hips wider. All this without using a single morph, meaning clothing will still fit the figure with no adjustments needed.
In the example below, I have played with Dawn (no morphs loaded!) to reduce her body size and proportions to match Nearme, and I've got a pretty good approximation playing only with the scale dials, leaving the head unchanged. Look how the clothing still fits. I could make Dawn look like Nearme without using any morphs, and then replaced her head with the Universal Chibi Head. The shoulders were a bit too wide, so I applied Narrow Shoulders to reduce them a bit. That's the only morph on scene.
There is a catch, though. The clothing must have the smoothing scale zones in place, which won't happen if they were rigged in Poser 10 or older. Only Poser Pro 11 can copy the smoothing scale zones from the figure for this to work properly. If you have PP11, and the clothing was rigged with an older version, the clothing will still not follow the body scaling correctly, because they have no smoothing scale zones in place. You can still use PP11's "Copy Zones From...", but that will copy ALL zones, not just the one you want. This will result into loosing the clothing rigging, replacing it with an automatic created one, which usually requires a lot of manual tweaking.
The most common case when the clothing doesn't have smoothing scale zones is that the clothing's hip group will not follow the body, causing an ugly deformation. If your body scaling doesn't involve the hip, then there is a pretty good chance it could still work with the clothing.
However, body scaling has some limitations when dealing with legacy rigging figures, like for example, Victoria 4. What happens is that legacy rigging depends on the figure proportions, since the visual gizmos used on the rigging will not scale with the figure. So if we make the legs longer, the rigging gizmos will not cover the entire legs, which will become more obvious when you try to pose the scaled figure. Legacy rigging relies on the figure size not changing, and that can be a problem. Nonetheless, we can still resize the gizmos on the figure to fit the new proportions, though this may not be for everyone.
When it comes to modern weight mapped figures like Dawn, this is no longer an issue. The new rigging guarantees that the weights are tied up to the figure's geometry at vertex level, so changing the body proportions will not affect them. However, clothing rigged with older versions of Poser will not have the smoothing scale zones, so it will misbehave.
There is another catch in Poser, which is how smoothing scale zones are created. A lot has changed when it comes to rigging in Poser, with the advent of directly editing weight maps in version 9. For example, legacy rigging uses visual gizmos to determine how the weight maps affect the joints, while modern weight map painting tools have completely eliminated them. However, the smoothing scale zones are an exception to that rule, because although you can paint weights directly to it, it still uses the old visual gizmos from legacy rigging to control the weights distribution - which doesn't make sense, but the fact is that this is how it works. In other words, creating them manually is not only counter intuitive, but the process is cumbersome, mixing new and old rigging methods. This is the only place where this happens in Poser, which makes me believe they didn't put much thought into it when designing the new rigging tools to handle weight maps painting.
I have requested SMS to add the ability to copy ONLY the smoothing scale zones from the figure, but apparently, they don't understand why someone would want that, no matter how many times I tried to explain, with examples. The result is that only clothes created with PP11 will support body scaling. I wonder if it is possible to create a Python script that can copy only the smooth scaling zones from the figure? I suppose only the more experienced Poser Python developers could answer this question, since I don't know if that capability is exposed to the Poser Python framework. Without that, if I want my older clothing to work with body scaling, I would have to rig them again from scratch in PP11, which is not quite reasonable. This restriction only applies to Poser, since DS handles body scaling in a completely different way, so clothing will always work with it.
The first time I have realized the importance of body scaling was when DAZ released "The Freak" figure, which relied heavily on body scaling, but at the time it didn't quite work in Poser. That was many years ago, and it's surprising that SMS has only added the ability to rig clothing with smoothing scale zones copied from the figure in Poser Pro 11. And even so, only when we rig the clothing from scratch. If you are a DS user, body scaling has always worked (as far I can remember).
I can't be sure, but I suspect this might be a reason why not so many take advantage of body scaling nowadays. When I first discovered this was possible in Poser, I have spent years posting all sorts of renders of body types and proportions using solely scaling, sometimes to complement morphs. I did that mostly with V4, sometimes having to fix her rigging since it won't scale with the figure. Nowadays, Dawn doesn't require that, so it's even more fun now than it was then.
One of the most underused features in Poser/DS is body scaling. In simple words, just get a figure with no morphs, and select a body group and play with the scale, scaleX, scaleY and scaleZ dials. Now select another body group and repeat the process until you get a new body shape. We can change the body proportions, like the length of the arms and legs, or even the torso. We can make the arms and legs thicker or thinner. We can make the waist narrower and the hips wider. All this without using a single morph, meaning clothing will still fit the figure with no adjustments needed.
In the example below, I have played with Dawn (no morphs loaded!) to reduce her body size and proportions to match Nearme, and I've got a pretty good approximation playing only with the scale dials, leaving the head unchanged. Look how the clothing still fits. I could make Dawn look like Nearme without using any morphs, and then replaced her head with the Universal Chibi Head. The shoulders were a bit too wide, so I applied Narrow Shoulders to reduce them a bit. That's the only morph on scene.
There is a catch, though. The clothing must have the smoothing scale zones in place, which won't happen if they were rigged in Poser 10 or older. Only Poser Pro 11 can copy the smoothing scale zones from the figure for this to work properly. If you have PP11, and the clothing was rigged with an older version, the clothing will still not follow the body scaling correctly, because they have no smoothing scale zones in place. You can still use PP11's "Copy Zones From...", but that will copy ALL zones, not just the one you want. This will result into loosing the clothing rigging, replacing it with an automatic created one, which usually requires a lot of manual tweaking.
The most common case when the clothing doesn't have smoothing scale zones is that the clothing's hip group will not follow the body, causing an ugly deformation. If your body scaling doesn't involve the hip, then there is a pretty good chance it could still work with the clothing.
However, body scaling has some limitations when dealing with legacy rigging figures, like for example, Victoria 4. What happens is that legacy rigging depends on the figure proportions, since the visual gizmos used on the rigging will not scale with the figure. So if we make the legs longer, the rigging gizmos will not cover the entire legs, which will become more obvious when you try to pose the scaled figure. Legacy rigging relies on the figure size not changing, and that can be a problem. Nonetheless, we can still resize the gizmos on the figure to fit the new proportions, though this may not be for everyone.
When it comes to modern weight mapped figures like Dawn, this is no longer an issue. The new rigging guarantees that the weights are tied up to the figure's geometry at vertex level, so changing the body proportions will not affect them. However, clothing rigged with older versions of Poser will not have the smoothing scale zones, so it will misbehave.
There is another catch in Poser, which is how smoothing scale zones are created. A lot has changed when it comes to rigging in Poser, with the advent of directly editing weight maps in version 9. For example, legacy rigging uses visual gizmos to determine how the weight maps affect the joints, while modern weight map painting tools have completely eliminated them. However, the smoothing scale zones are an exception to that rule, because although you can paint weights directly to it, it still uses the old visual gizmos from legacy rigging to control the weights distribution - which doesn't make sense, but the fact is that this is how it works. In other words, creating them manually is not only counter intuitive, but the process is cumbersome, mixing new and old rigging methods. This is the only place where this happens in Poser, which makes me believe they didn't put much thought into it when designing the new rigging tools to handle weight maps painting.
I have requested SMS to add the ability to copy ONLY the smoothing scale zones from the figure, but apparently, they don't understand why someone would want that, no matter how many times I tried to explain, with examples. The result is that only clothes created with PP11 will support body scaling. I wonder if it is possible to create a Python script that can copy only the smooth scaling zones from the figure? I suppose only the more experienced Poser Python developers could answer this question, since I don't know if that capability is exposed to the Poser Python framework. Without that, if I want my older clothing to work with body scaling, I would have to rig them again from scratch in PP11, which is not quite reasonable. This restriction only applies to Poser, since DS handles body scaling in a completely different way, so clothing will always work with it.
The first time I have realized the importance of body scaling was when DAZ released "The Freak" figure, which relied heavily on body scaling, but at the time it didn't quite work in Poser. That was many years ago, and it's surprising that SMS has only added the ability to rig clothing with smoothing scale zones copied from the figure in Poser Pro 11. And even so, only when we rig the clothing from scratch. If you are a DS user, body scaling has always worked (as far I can remember).
I can't be sure, but I suspect this might be a reason why not so many take advantage of body scaling nowadays. When I first discovered this was possible in Poser, I have spent years posting all sorts of renders of body types and proportions using solely scaling, sometimes to complement morphs. I did that mostly with V4, sometimes having to fix her rigging since it won't scale with the figure. Nowadays, Dawn doesn't require that, so it's even more fun now than it was then.
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