I think people are thinking about geometry switching the wrong way.

You could set up geometry switching to use the exact same geometry but with different UV maps to deal with the UV stretching.

The only problem with that is setting it all up, and the size increase issue that it creates.

It isn't that hard to set up geometry switching on a traditional character. Weight mapped characters would be a lot more complex to set up, and could make for some rather large cr2's as well. To complicate matters even more, any injections would also have to be injected into the additional geometry as well. You can inject 100's of megs of morphs into some characters already, if you duplicated a most of the character it would bloat it even more. 32 bit users could have issues using just one clothed character set up this way.

Weight mapping can drastically cut down on UV stretching by evening out the stretching across a lot more of the limb. For instance, on the leg bend it would pull all of the skin covering the quads and shins torwards the knee when bending the leg. I have mapped quite a few characters that way and it works great on nude characters that have somewhat of an even skin tone. It doesn't work so well if the character has tattoos or a second skin applied. The same maps do not work on most clothes  either. The clothes will have to be mapped independently from the character if it is mapped this way. Shorts over the leg mapped that way would pull down in the front when bending the knee, which would look very odd and introduce UV issues to the clothes.

What we really need is a way to use multiple UV maps on the same character and morphable UV maps.

Multiple UV maps would not bloat the character that much. This can be done now by conforming two characters together that have different UVing (or modded textures to correct for the stretching, but that requires very large textures for it to work right), then adjusting displacement to select which parts show, where.

There are a few different versions of Morphable UV Mapping, but not in Poser. The most common way of doing it offsets the center of the map and would require many of the characters we have now to be remapped occordingly to use it effectively.

Another we have now of dealing with it, is to add a procedural setup to the shader that hides the stretching. This can be done with spots-turbulence-etc using a mix of standard (UV) and globally applied shaders, then blended that with the texture you want to use. Doing it this way works for stills and for animations, but may require some filter work to all the frames to get it to look right in an animation. Globally applied shaders can cause issues in animations depending on the strength of the effect and how much the character moves or rotates, and may not be worth the trouble.

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