Hi, I'm starting to get some mastery now, and I realize that I don't have Victoria.  I see that I can obtain Victoria only from daz3d.com.   Thing is, I notice other market products for V1, V2, V3 and V4.  If I buy V4, will all V products work on her, or only those made for V4.  What about with V3 and the other Victoria versions?

Thanks!

Clothes for V1 and 2 are interchangeable, i believe. V3 came with a V3-V2 mesh, which gave you V3's head on a V2 body, although it didn't allow for any of V2's body morphs. V4 has done the same, giving you an unmodifiable V3 body mesh with V4's headon the top (which I believe CAN still be morphed).

Hair-wsie, so far as I'm aware, each generation (with the exception of Vs 1&2) has had a different head mesh, so hair and hats will nto fit immediately. With a littel scaling and translation, they may still work, though.

Character morphs and texturing is not cross-compatible fro one generation to the next.

I think that covers all the bases. If I'm wrong on any of these points, I'm sure someone will come along and corect me. :)

jonthecelt

"It depends".

Conforming clothing for one character e.g. V3, will not work very easily with a different character, e.g. V4.  Some of it can be converted using tools like Wardrobe Wizard from www.philc.net.

Dynamic clothing can almost always be made to work reasonably well with little effort.

Conforming figure-based hair can sometimes be made to work with a small amount of effort, and sometimes it takes a whole lot of effort.  Many times the hair can simply be treated as a prop (don't conform it, just parent it to the head) and work quite well.

Prop-based hair can very often be made to work very well with a small amount of effort.

Textures cannot be shared between V3 and V4 at this time, although I've heard about a module in the works for a texture conversion utility over at the DAZ forums.

Shoes and boots can fairly often be shared between figures with a medium amount of effort (hiding the feet, resizing the feet or shoes, special poses for the feet).

Victoria 3 is a very good figure, but has issues with bending, particularly when the figure is heavily morphed.  I feel these problems are much less serious in V4, although V4 does still have some issues with bending, a couple of which are new and weren't ever a major problem in V3.

V3 is a very "mature" figure, in that there is a very, very wide selection of add-ons that are made for that figure (some of which can be shared as above).  There are so many products produced by so many talented people that some truly magnificent items have evolved - significantly, Aery_Soul's clothing and hairs, Blackhearted/Rio's GND2 and associated clothing items, Danae's Manhattan, Tendom/Nike's NT Anna, very large collections of wonderful items by Outoftouch and Pretty3d and too many other masterpieces for any single listing.  Just browsing through the marketplace here or at Daz3d or other sites will give you a feel for how sophisticated the V3 offerings usually are compared to the majority of V4-specific content, much of which has been produced very quickly to take advantage of the recent release of the figure.  

Not that there aren't any great items for V4 yet - to the contrary, Aery_Soul, Val3dArt, Idler168 and many others have produced some early masterpieces - but the market has only been open to V4 content for a couple of months, and V3 has a couple of years of head start.  Prices for V3 content tend to be lower as well, since V4 currently is getting so much attention due to her newness.

Basically think about what you want to do, look for content that you think is worth your money, and make your decision based on that.

PS: if it says Hongyu on it, it's basically awesome, for either figure.

Wow, as always, fantastic replies.  I really appreciate it.  In my searching around, I seem to find more for V4 on my first pass than for V3 and earlier.   However, I like pjz's write-up, so I'll probably buy V3 for now and probably get V4 later.  

It's funny, after having owned Poser for a few years, I'm finally mastering some of the basics and really starting to spend more time with it.   I guess as the saying goes:  In the history of all things that work, there was a time when they didn't.

Note that in either case, V3 or V4, you will need the morphs as well as the basic figure.

considering V3 (and M3/A3) are free, that's a good place to start. Agree that the inj/rems would be helpful, but you're not totally locked into having them.

You can get Victoria 3 for free here

pzj99 is absolutely right in saying "it depends."  In the end, you may find yourself starting with one figure and migrating to another.... or not.  Personally, I started with V2, and bought V3 and then V4 when they each came out.  After buying all their morphs and then spending days (actually, more like weeks) trying to shape and bend V3 and V4 to my liking, I abandoned each one in turn and returned to my customized V2 figures... where I am today.  Of course, my hopes spring eternal that V5 will finally make me truly happy.

Get V3 because she has the most free stuff.

V4 doesn't have much for freebies yet & you have to pay a small little fortune to buy cloths, hair, textures & morphs for her just to get started with her. And she's not that widely supported just yet and I don't think she ever will be by the looks of it.

I agree, get the free figures first. Give V4 some more time for a better choice of stuff and better morphs she is still new.

1.) V3 has a version of Daz's "Muscular" morphs!  V4 has no such morphs.  For a look at these morphs click on the "Homepage" link under my avatar, and/or the lips in my signature  The male figure is Daz3D's M2, and the female is DAZ's V3.

2.)  V3 is higher resolution, which although translates to higher resource requirements, means sharper images.

3.) I'll wager there is more V3 stuff for free than there is at sale for V4!  All in all V3 has like10 times more stuff than V4, and it will probably be that way for another year or two, maybe more...

4.) And...(Drumroll please!)...Victoria 3 has been Free, for a long, long time!  Go to download.com, and search for "DAZ" you'll see a Figure pak with V3 in it(...As well as Bryce 5and it's Presets!)  You'll still need to purchase her head and body morph packs, but these are probably dirt cheap through the platinum club, and do go on sale now and again.

Well, V3 is made from more polygons, which may or may not be of value.  I haven't found V4 to have any problems with a polygonal look in any degree of zoom, which suggests to me that despite the lower poly count (V3 is around 60k, V4 is around 50k if I recall) they're placed and shaped such that there isn't any loss of percieved smoothness of the figure.

Poly count is not as important now as it was with P4 or DS. With P5 and up smoothing, low poly figures look great. It is more where the poly is placed now.

Now for Males, there is Apollo Maxamus, the male figure that I think will become the standard in figures, male anyways and will be free. I heard a rumour that it was today, I have not had a chance to look.

beryld - I've head of Applo before, but hav'nt seen him yet.  Do you have a link, or more importantly a favorite render?

A higher resolution mesh means more points to which a texture map needs to be accounted for, hence higher(and much higher) resolution Texture Maps can be used; for bigger, and higher DPI, renders.  You would'nt notice this by say loading 10 V3 figures into one scene, and then only having enough PC resources to rendering a Screensaver sized image.  But when you get into Life Size renders you begin to appreciete Resolution.

I wrote a thread on Figure Vertex Counts a few weeks back.  When you load an .OBJ into UV Mapper, the first thing UV Mapper does after load is tell you the Resolution:

 V3, D3, and M3 - 72,712

 V4 - 67,619

Not much of a difference, but for any reasons not to make V3 and V4 compatible with any existing figure, the trend should have been an increase.

Attached Link: Apollo

My point was that with the smoothing options of newer versions, the poly count is not as important as it was. You can create a figure with less poly and have it look just as good as high poly figures. It all depends on where you have those polies. Take a look at an ef figure, do you really think it makes that much difference in how they look with an eye poly count the same as some figures? No. It just make the figure a resource hog and Ef figures prove that. High rez is good for morphs/character building and close ups. Not for animations, and normal use. I use the V3RR a lot for those reasons and would like to see the V4RR released. It has sliped out that there is one. What do you think many of your v4 Daz clothes are made from.

Now Apollo is at CP general forum, so anyone can read it. And it looks like he is not yet released but I don't think it will be to long now.

Quote - Apollo Maxamus, the male figure that I think will become the standard in figures, male anyways and will be free. I heard a rumour that it was today, I have not had a chance to look.

You can verify rumors at the designers webpage, www.antonkisieldesigns.com/. I haven't seen anything new there or at the D|S forum where he's been doing most his reporting.

And it may be released through some more obscure channel, but the hype won't fade any until it's an open and public release, else the rumors could be just more hype.

Not following you. D/S forum? What has DazStudio got to do with it. I would suggest clicking on the link I gave in previous post. Anton added some more morphs since I last looked in. I'm not going to judge how obscure the release will be. I do know a few reliable artists offered to mirror the files.

Oh well, does not matter to me, I've had Apollo from the start, so I can wait till the new version is out.

Quote - A higher resolution mesh means more points to which a texture map needs to be accounted for, hence higher(and much higher) resolution Texture Maps can be used; for bigger, and higher DPI, renders. 

 

A higher resolution mesh means that curved surfaces are broken up into more, smaller facets so that curves appear smoother. 'High resolution mesh' It has nothing to do with the size (resolution) of texture you can apply to it. You can apply a higher resolution texture (ie: a texture image file having more pixels) to any mesh, high res or low res.

V4 has a lower overall vertex count than V3 because they did a good job of 'cleaning up the mesh', removing redundant edgeloops, using fewer, larger polygons wherever facetting wouldn't show. This economy allowed them to use a higher resolution mesh on the face for better extreme morphing, facial expressions etc.

V4 also has far better UVmapping than V3 (how the model skin is spread out onto a flat texture image). Important areas like the face are spread over a much larger portion of the texture map, whereas in V3 the back of the head enjoyed most of the texture and the face was a tiny area in the middle. So the same size head texture file (say 4096 pixels wide) will look far better in a really big render of V4 than a 4096 wide head texture on V3. Again, this has nothing to do with how many vertices there are in the mesh.

The "high res Jessie figure is a good example of how not to model a figure - the extremely high polygon count serves no purpose at all.

Not much of a difference, but for any reasons not to make V3 and V4 compatible with any existing figure, the trend should have been an increase.

The trend of increasing polygon count is a moot point, because Poser 5 and later have polygon smoothing. Increasing the poly count of a figure puts more burden on your CPU, which is especially detrimental for animators.

If anything, REDUCING polygon count by building efficient models is the way to go. The G2 figures are very polygon heavy ... whereas newer figures like V4 and Apollo make their reduced polygons go much farther.

MORE polygons does not necessarily make a figure better.

It stopped snowing, the sun came out, the cat finally went to sleep and quit bugging me to go outside because he was sure that the weather was different at each and every door, and, two people actually agree with me about poly count and smoothing.

Can this day get any better?