Surely you’d have to export her to a 3D CAD program to do this..?

Rhino should be able to deal with it well, or maybe even sketchup?

In general there are a lot of requests here to do some alteration or to build something that is not at all what Capture should or can be doing.

I don’t believe it was built as a program that should be a one stop shop for everything, including sets or building models etc - it’s ‘just’ for lighting visualisation.

Years ago ‘another program’ tried to include CAD elements within its core; it was a complete mess; while the lighting visualisation was very good for the time, its so called CAD was a disaster . There were plenty of CAD programs, some of them even free that could do a much much better job.

And the same is true now…

( I'll try to do it for you here if you don't have access to a cad program...? )

cheers

 Tony

Posted By rabbit on 8/21/2026 9:54 PM

Surely you’d have to export her to a 3D CAD program to do this..?

Well. When you import a 3d model into capture, in the dialog that appears you can set the drawing unit used by the model (so it's correctly scaled to the capture world.

After import, you can change this value, in the object's properties, if you got it wrong, or mis-typed the value. So this is a kind-of valid workflow, but not recommended.

This does work,for simple models that are a single element, but when objects are imported in sections, it scales each individual section around their individual origins, rather than the origin of the combined model (or the origin of the model before they were exported and imported). If you go to a more aggressive scale factor (e.g 0.5) you'll see that the shoes and feet also separate from the rest of the body. If the model hierarchy was flattened before bringing it into capture then the model would likely behave correctly. But it looks like the import has maintained some file structure to the model.

For most internal library objects you wouldn't have this option, but some of the more complex items (like the newer people that are fixed sizes) are clearly imported models and have this user defined scale.

I agree with most of the comments. For imported models from other apps you cannot expect Capture to fix problems of scaling. As said, Caoture isn't and mustn't be a full-blown 3d Cad programm. The difference here is that "Emma" is a library item included in the Capture library and that I do a permissable action on that library item wich results in something that is clearly not right.

So either the action of scaling must be greyed out, or the model needs to be fixed in such a way that I can resize it.

The reason i want to resize the built-in model is to quickly add a group of singers/dancers/actors that all look slightly different in order to give a less eerie feeling. So I change the scale by a couple of inches, I change the color of the hair, skin, dress, etc. Normally I choose from a library of 3d people I've collected over the years and they almost always scale as predicted (probably because the export was done using the method described below). Now I decided to give the built-in model a try and saw an unexpected outcome.

If I understand the situation correctly you are attempting to scale Emma by changing the Drawing Unit property. Emma is a group of imported objects that do not share a common origo. What happens when you change the Drawing Unit property is that all objects scale relative their origo, which is why Emma looks like she's had a bad pass through Scotty's transporter.

The better approach is to use the Scale Drawing Unit command. I would suggest using it in a section view, drawing the reference line from the floor up to the top of her head. That will allow you to enter her height in nice way as well.

he better approach is to use the Scale Drawing Unit command. I would suggest using it in a section view, drawing the reference line from the floor up to the top of her head. That will allow you to enter her height in nice way as well.

I did not know that tool even existed, that's very useful.

With the model selected, in the context menu > Model > Scale Drawing Unit (the same place as Hide distracting edges). Choose the start and end points you want to scale based on, then enter the new dimension you want it to have.

It does affect the position of the object in a slightly weird way. Depending which view you scale in, it scales the position from the view plane. i.e. selecting in a 'Right' section view the position will scale the X position only, or selecting in a front view it will scale the Z position only, or selecting and scaling from a 'Top' view will scale the Y position only.