srrdude; Welcome to your new addiction! The DAZ models aren't 'neccesary' per se. But DAZ has snatched a lot of the market, simply by having the marketing power to get their message out, and providing a steady stream of new content. And there is a lot of content out there that you either have to have one of the DAZ models to use, or be ready to spend a lot of time in Morph Manager and Tailor to try and fit it to the models you -do- use. Don't worry about the 'incompatibilities' of DAZ and P5; there really aren't any. What basically happened is that DAZ decided not to support the new P5 shader system; only the old P4 texture system. So unless a brokered artist threw in a one click MAT file that was made specifically for P5, all you got was P4 level texture application....and since bump map support was altered (they stopped using .bum files, which are more pseudo displacement maps, and started using proper .jpg grayscales). The P5 figures are more like blank slates; you also have to factor in the fact that P5 had a =very= rocky launch, and to this day there is still a great deal of animus. Personally, I do animation and love the extra articulation in Judy. As for the bumpmaps; what channel are you connecting them to? There are several that can accept a grayscale and seem to work...but not quite.