Downloaded the free Vicky3 base from the DAZ website about a week ago. Wondering why not all of the sliders work for the head or body morphs and expressions I,m afraid to purchase any of the characters or texture packages from the marketplace as i'm concerned they may not work properly. What could i be missing?

You'll probably have to purchase the head and body morph packs separately.

The dials won't work without the morph packs and nor will any character morphs unless the characters have custom morphs. The non functional dials are empty channels. They will become active when the correct morphs are injected.

V3 base has only mesh and character no morphs, to make dials to work you need to buy body and head morph packs they are sold separately. Textures for v3 will work with base and there is a lot of nice custom morphed (which do not contain daz morphs) characters in marketplace for v3.

AHA! That's how they getcha.

Do remember that the expression morphs are included in the free version of V3, so you can do some decent work without the extras

You only get the 'base' bare bones figure of V3 & M3. The rest you gotta buy lol. I'm not that desperate. V3 is close to a 30meg file as it is without adding all the extra morphs to her. ;)

If you like the basic body shape, the V3 Magnet Sets by Wyrmmaster, William the Bloody, and Maveris are an alternative to the Body Morphs. They are very "tweakable" and you don't have to worry about transferring morphs to clothes.

I've found the M3 and V3 inj and rem, etc., in the Poses section. Surprisingly, I have more control over Mike and Vickie-lo's faces (noses, for example), than V3 and M3..go figure..;) Now if I can just figure out that transparency vs eyelashes trick..;)

The latest versions of V3, the SAE that is being given away, comes with 59 expression morphs pre-injected in the face and the spandex body morphs. This is new since the SR2 release (I've just checked). So, very few body morphs, no face type morphs, but all of the expression morphs.

A possible answer to the original question is that some of the expression morphs don't appear to be doing anything from the main camera, only from more closeup views, and some of the neck morphs only make very tiny differences, intended to help make the face morphs more realistic

Are there any free custom (non-morphpack) morphs out there?

There are some in the Free Stuff here - have a look in the Morph Targets section. There are several sets of character packs in there

But be careful - some aren't actually morph targets, but are bundles of morph settings for the Daz morphs

Yeah, that's what I figured-many do say that the morph packs are required. I'll probably get them eventually but for now, I have the Ultimate Breast mags. Why would you need anything else :-)