I am a beginner. I just downloaded Daz 3d to begin messing around with it, and it loads up Victoria 4 just fine and everything else seems to be functioning okay. EXCEPT: I've tried every permutation I could find to load 3rd party content into Daz 3d and it simply will not work. No matter where I place the runtimes, I can't the new content to register in the content load window. I've tried to create new content folders and change the setting in Preferences just like all the tutorials say, but it's just not happening. I thought this software was supposed to be easy to get started on. What am I missing

Did you run a scan for Poser content outside of Studio?  You can do that from your Preferences menu and then Studio will know where everything is.  You don't have to move anything around.

I think I answered this on the DAZ forums, but you need to either search to add your content to the database or switch to folder view instead of the default category view. Click the triangle button at the extreme top-right of the Content plaette to get the option menu, from which you can do either.

To elaborate:

D|S since version 2.1 has two ways of viewing content:

1. Folder views, which show the folder structure as it's laid out on the hard drive, and
2. Category views, which use a database.

Category view lets you rearrange your content in whatever categories you want without changing the folder structure on the disk.  However, to use it you have to do a Search for Content in order to populate the database.  This puts everything it finds in the Unassigned category, from which you can move it around wherever you like.

Category view is the default, so you need click the triangle in the upper right corner of the content tab and either:

1. Change to a Folder view, or
2. Search for Content.
    

 Thanks, everyone for your help. I've sort of spent the last couple of days in Daz3d boot camp and it's kind of coming around. I'm getting ahead of myself at this point, but I really want to start doing portraits right away. 

I almost dropped a bit of money that I can't afford on Daz's Elite Textures, but then I discovered a mention of Pureskins somewhere here on the forums. Shout out to Renderosity for saving me a pretty penny. 

I haven't bought the texture yet though because, honestly, I don't completely know what I'm doing. The texture itself seems great in terms of skin and detail and all, but the faces are non-descript.

My question is: Can you use a Texture like Pureskin with a character like Freya's Blanchette to ultimately get both the photorealistic skintone you want and the face you want? Is that how morphs work? Can I just get the facial morphs if I already have the Texture and the base model (V4)?

I apologize if these are super-backward questions, but like I said, I'm playing catch-up. Any advice or help that anyone is willing to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

You can use any skin texture designed for your character that you want as long as they're not for resale.

For example, you can put any of the Pureskins on any V4 character using the supplied mat poses and you should be okay.

If you want to customize V4 (add morphs) you'll need to either purchase the character/texture package (i.e. Freya's Blanchette) or design your own, something I don't know how to do in Studio.  I use Poser to morph my characters when I create a character/texture package.

 Great, thanks. So just to clarify: Something like "Blanchette" comes with it's own texture, but I can utilize a different texture, say, a Pureskin, and just use the face from Blanchette. Is that the same for the Blanchette body? And that's through "morphing"?

That's right.  The morphs come in the character/texture package but you aren't limited to just that texture set.