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.