Quote - You're evading, joequick.

What are the advantages of SubD and displacement maps over polygons IN POSER ? For the end user ?

Unfortunately i cannot answer the "IN POSER" part, because i do not have subdivision in poser, but the disadvantage of having many polygons (for me as an end user) is definitely render time. Not render time in firefly, but render time in the preview. I do not really care if firefly renders 4 or 5 minutes, it is long enough that i have to get up and take a break anyway. But most of my time with poser i do not spent with rendering but with manipulation (posing, loading objects, materials etc) of meshes. And at least on my (not so new) computer the difference between 100K and 20K polygons is quite noticable especially if there are a lot of morphs involved. I did not measure it exactly, but it feels like manipulating a 100K mesh takes like at least 10ms more, giving me only 20 frames per second instead of 30, when bending an arm of a figure for example. Not the end of the world, but noticable. Doing the same with 10 figures instead of one gives me (felt) 5 frames per second which is unacceptable; as a consequence i never use 1Mio polygons in Poser but would rather spend some time, effort and if possible money to reduce that number. As long as Poser cannot deliver at least 50 fps with 1mio polygons, i see polygon reduction as a valid strategy to make it more usable. If i had a fast enough computer to do that (one day i will), i would like to render e.g. a vue scene in the background, while working with poser rather than to fill up the cpu with more polygons. And only if this works fluidly (Poser giving me, say 100fps, while running a render in the background) i would agree to having more polygons being a good thing without reservations. Until that happens the number of polygons will always be a compromise between quality and usability (my personal opinion, of course, other people probably have other priorities).