many of you quibbling about the price simply dont understand how things work outside of the poser community.

if you need a rigged med-poly female model for something - complete with displacement/normal/texture maps and shaders - there are three routes you can go:

• if you have in-house guys that can make it, then you pay their wages for x months while they develop it.
• you commission an individual/studio to make it for you. price for something like this would start at 5 figures.
• you go online and purchase something like this for $999. then you can either use it as is, give it to your in-house guys to tweak, or commission someone to tweak it. either way it will be a lot cheaper than developing everything from scratch.

and yeah, as Teyon said, the Poser community doesnt know how good they have it. products for $1-25, no inflation for 12+ years despite a massively devalued US dollar, about half the product dev time is spent on 'poserization'/poser-specific features and conforming, and customer support on top of everything.

 

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as for the model itself being better than vicky - not even close. here is pretty much what i posted in the other thread:

50% of its functionality would be lost in Poser.  a lot of what you are looking at is Max rigging, meshsmooth and Mental Ray. it would look and function nothing like that in Poser.

even if you could get it to, your very first customer comment would be: 'she looks nice but i really hope you can morph away that definition'. since its a normal/disp map you cant: its baked into that exact body type you see unless you strip off the normal/disp maps - in which case its nothing special. just another vicky-esque figure with equally poor bending.

a 7500 poly model would have inferior versatility and morphing potential, and i dont really see the point when weve been happily rendering figures with 10x that vert count for a decade.

i can tell you from a morphers perspective that a simple 'quad grid' mesh like that is a real PITA to morph compared to one with topology that flows with the anatomy. not to mention noone would bother trying to morph a 7500 poly mesh: you need to sub-D it once and make it 30k polys before you tried, and youd still be hampered by the mesh topology.

ps: its somehow sickly reassuring that even a $1000 figure in a $4000 application looks like ass with its arm raised.