Hunh, found this thread again by accident and didn't realize I had missed a question.  Anyway, here's Keith's Basic Character Creation Method for good or ill.  Note I'm running Poser Pro 2010, as some of this won't work (or will require some extra steps) if you don't have a Load Full Body Morph option.

First, I have several "base" figures sitting in my directory.  There's the run of the mill Vic4.2.  I also have a "Full Vic4.2" with all the "standard" morph packs already injected (that is, the ones supplied by DAZ that use an ExP to create the channels).  I have a "Head Only Vic4.2" that only has the head morphs loaded.  And then I have a "Character Base Vic4.2" that has the expression morphs, body morphforms (the ones that you can use to bend the figure and such), and some other useful morphs such as the armpit fixes.

The reason I have so many is to set up a standard workflow.  What I'll do is use the Full Vic4.2 to fool around and get the general body shape I want.  If the character isn't going to be wearing conforming clothing (so either dynamic clothing, or naked/second skin), I'll export the body as an obj, then use the Load Full Body Morph command to load it into my Character Base Vic4.2, et voila.  Fully morphed character with the set of (what I consider) necessary additional morphs.  If other morphs are necessary, say some muscle morphs to flex the biceps or whatever, I'll load them as well, and I'm done.

If the character is going to be wearing conforming clothing, the workflow is different. 

Usually I load up the Head Only Vic4.2 and create the character's face.  Once that's done, I could either export only the head as an obj, or again export a full-body obj.  I've started exporting full bodies because head-only creates problems if the morph has affected the eyes in some manner (size and/or position), and it's a pain in the ass to fix.

Since I have know what the body is going to look like (because I've usually experimented with the Full Vic4.2 beforehand, or otherwise know what I need based on what morphs are available in the costume that's going to be used), I take the Character Base 4.2, again Load Full Body Morph to load the face I've created, and then load only the individual morphs that I need.   To give an example I'm working on right now, from the Morphs++ list I loaded the NailsLong, WaistWidth, BicepsFlex, Definition and some of the breast morphs individually.

The main thing is figuring out which morphs actually matter.  If a character is wearing a fairly loose-fitting outfit that covers a lot of the body, many of those morphs regarding breast shape, detailed shape of the belly, muscle definition and the like are a waste of time (nipple morphs, for instance).

If the same character has to appear in more revealing clothing, I'll create another CR2 with only the additional morphs I need.  If the character is pretty much nude, or doesn't have to worry about conforming clothing morphs, I'll create a third CR2 with a full body morph and get rid of almost everything else.

The end result is a CR2 that only has the morphs I need, which keeps the size down dramatically.  My Full Vic4.2 is 200MB.  My typical characters, including clothing and hair (which varies in size dramatically) might be less than 40MB.

 

This means that, if I'm doing a character who appears in more than one image, I will likely have multiple CR2s for that one character with different morphs loaded.  I do this because drive space is cheap, so I don't really care how much space it takes up there.  Memory for rendering, however, is different, so I use the version of the character which optimizes memory use to get what I need for that image.