You are trading the convenience of being able to use somebody else's work for modeling, uvmapping and texturing - in exchange:
- you must rig and weight a 60k poly figure yourself

• you must design MANY MANY joint-driven morphs for a 60k poly figure yourself
• the results won't be redistributable (derivative work, although if you have a student license for Max that's already binding you anyway)
• you will have learned nothing about modeling, uvmapping and texturing (valuable skills you could use every single day)
• you will remain addicted to purchasing content that you could model and texture yourself (and even sell for a profit!)

Have you done a texture for V4?  Do you know how difficult that UVmap is to work with even if you have a good projection painting suite (I have, teamed with jjroland, and I do).  Have you taken a really good look at commercial textures out there?  Have you noticed some of the flaws that are ubiquitous even in the DAZ flagship textures?

You have vision and passion, why settle for somebody else's vision and try to adapt it to your own?  The work of designing your own character from scratch is hard, and there is a lot of distraction and not-so-helpful information out there, but the path you're already considering is drastically harder than you think it is anyway.  It boils down to how much work you're willing to put into fixing the many, many problems you're going to encounter, rather than start from scratch and avoid most of those problems in exchange for different problems that imo will be easier to solve.  To me, it is more frustrating to overcome the many inherent problems of trying to adapt somebody else's character content rather than just model and rig my own from scratch.  Looking back I wish I had spent a lot more time learning the skills required for doing this myself, rather than trying to adapt somebody else's results and failing repeatedly.

My Freebies