im new to poser and animation, and i'm wondering how you make your own characters

Load a base model, choose head or body, and begin spinning morph dials. There are much more sophisticated ways to do it, but this is the simple place/process to begin with. Do you need help finding the things I'm telling you to do here? If so, ask for more detailed help. Many here will be forthcoming.

 A character in Poser is often used to mean a figure (like Victoria 4) that has been modified by morphs and textures to look different.

If you want to know how to make your own figure thats a bit different.

:) confusing isnt it .

yes it is...so some of the poser products in the market place were just default characters like Alyson, but morphed a little?

Quote - yes it is...so some of the poser products in the market place were just default characters like Alyson, but morphed a little?

Read "Almost All."

There are very few original characters. Antonia is the most recent one. The vast majority of the characters here and at Daz3d are simply morphs added to Victoria 4 with the morph++ add-on package. Building a model from scratch is the labor of a year or more. Creating a morph for V4 or other base model takes a few minutes for something simple to a few weeks for something really complex, like a portrait.

The characters applied to existing models actually consist of two parts: the morph and the texture.

The morph is done with the dials attached to the base character.

The texture is usually created in photoshop or other photo app using photos of actual people and/or a hand-painted texture. There are base textures for sale here in the marketplace that allow those of us with less than a lot of talent in this area to "sort of" make our own textures. You call the base texture into photoshop and make the changes on it that you want to add to your character. It's down and dirty, but it works.

I've created and marketed one character here. The morph took about 3 months to perfect, working on it off and on. (It was a morph portrait of a real person.) I used one of the metrchant resource textures, but made a lot of changes to it in terms of bodyhair, skin tone, and skin markings. This took about a week.

Buying a pre-built character that you either really like, or that is close to what you are looking for takes about 5 minutes.

thats really cool!

but what if your creating a character who's structure is similar to a cartoon 3d fig, such as one of the incredibles. would it still take a really long time?

Yep. Unless ou are a whiz ins a modeling program like Wings or blender. Poser does nopt have the ability to create models from scratch internally.

If you want a toon, check out Toon Boy Sam over at Daz3d. He's cheap... about 25$ including a basic set of clothes and hair.

If you want to get a taste of making your own from a simple sphere, you can download the free Sculptris from Pixologic.com.  Sculptris is a baby brother of ZBrush, a very baby brother.  However it is extremely easy to learn and work in a manner like modeling clay.  Jan   

Attached Link: http://poser.smithmicro.com/tutorials/Characters_model_import.html