V4 has a zillion morphs, most of which I seldom use and a bunch of which I never use. Such as the male morphs and and the stock facial character morphs and many others. Is there any harm in deleting these from my working copy of V4 in the interest of slimmed-down scenes?

My understanding is that the more morphs that are loaded, even if almost all of them are set at zero, the more it bogs down performance. Is that correct? If so, I'd like to have a copy of Vicky with as few morphs as possible, if there is no danger in removing most of them. I realize the ones that control joints etc. shouldn't be touched. But if I never plan to use Breast Implants, for example, why not remove it from my working copy of V4?

You could just load the morphs you are going to use.  To my understanding, you are loading all the morphs which is unnecessary.  There is a separate folder which contains the individual morphs.  Load as needed.

My understanding was that Vicky comes out of the box with every DAZ morph, including Girl 4, Aiko 4, and Stephanie 4, but they aren't visible until "installed." Once installed, removing them with the REM file doesn't actually remove them, they are just made invisible again.

As an experiment I stripped out all the unneeded morphs (including hundreds of invisible ones for A4, G4 and S4). V4's file size shrunk in half, from 67 MB to 34 MB.

But I'll also try what you suggest, though it sounds tedious injecting one morph at a time.

@ imax4 , sorry but thats wrong.

the base figure includes empty channels for each morph, but no deltas amd the dials are hidden. The name is also -.

when an inj pose is applied it loads the morph values for the vertex positions (deltas) and it also nakes the dial visible and changes the name. A rem pose hides the dial and removes the deltas, changes the name back to -.

Some of the dials are not injected but part of the base figure.

There are a few python scripts that will remove the morphs that are set to 0 from a figure to reduce its memory requirement.  Check freestuff.

( I think thats how it works)

removing a morph from the figure simply makes it unavailable but does no harm. The dev or blank cr2 is simply the figure with all the morphs stripped out. 

There are a few morphs that will change how the figure bends , the jcm morphs that clean up the figure when it bends.

Ah, I see. My "base" V4 was actually one that had all the Morph++ and the other add-on morph sets installed. At the time I did that I didn't realize the memory that all those morphs would consume. My base figure had bloated to 67 MB. I see the real base V4 with only the default head and expression morphs is only 1.2 MB.

So I'll do what hborre suggested, start with the 1.2 MB Vicky and add only those morphs I think I'll use, then add others as I need them. Installing the entire Basic and Morph++ packages, while the quickest way, adds aboout 4 times more morphs than I actually use.

I missed a bit. If you open the inj pose in a text editor (I use wordpad that came with winxp) you may find that it uses a readscript command to refer to a file in the !DAZ folder.  If you look at the inj pose that loads all the morphs (or a large subset of them) you can make your oen pose file to inj only those values you use often.

hre is what the V4 inj all base morphs looks like

{
version
    {
        number 4.01
    }

    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.CTRLTongueSide-Side.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.DSTStrength.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.FBMMale.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.FBMMaleNS.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.FHMGeorge.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.FHMJohn.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Base:InjDeltas.FHMPaul.pz2"

well the forum has messed it up some but you get the idea , each readscript is its own line.

Use external binary morphs. I have saved to my library a V4 with nearly all the morphs (++, Elite, Aiko4, Stephanie4) and it loads in less than 5 seconds in my machine. And I also don't care for the PZ3(Z) scene size file because they directly point to my custom PMD V4 file and I did the same with clothes, hairs and props (even with extracting geometrie datas when needed) so all my scenes size are only around only 500kb and load very quick.

PMDs does have merit, however many users have had increasing problems with such files and have completely turned away from using this feature.  It could work for you.

External binary morphs are the spawn of the devil - especially if you render in another program