Mike Campau created the artwork for our Poser 8 box cover working with just Alyson's base mesh, an early version of the final texture, and primarily the face room morphs and a few of our face shaping morphs. He used a combination of his own custom trans mapped hair pieces with a few strands of hair. The cover art was rendered using Poser 8's ray tracer and some custom lights sets that Campau has created for his own rendering projects.

As far as differentiating between a 3D character and a 3D figure? These terms are interchangeable everywhere but Poser world.  But for clarity here, we consider variants off the male and female base mesh "Figures" to be "Characters"

I've added more detail about the Poser 8 characters' design in this thread:
renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

Hope that helps.

Steve Cooper
Poser Product Manager