But to quote Ryan Kingslien "the sculptor with the most polys wins".

Been watching this thread with interest and there are good points from both perspectives.

I'm with JoePublic in this respect though - there is a place for high-res figures where secondary detail can be carried in the mesh. Maps are good for tertiary detail - veins, wrinkles, skin pores. 

Here's the way I'm thinking - every Poser figure is multi-mapped. Rex and Roxie have a head and body map, V4 has body, limbs and head. A good displacement map should be 16 bit (over 65,000 'steps' of gray as compared to 256 for an 8 bit grayscale map) - and the file size increases accordingly. So to carry crisp secondary detail on a figure like Roxie with 26,000 quads will take two 16 bit grayscale displacement maps at something like 2000 pixels square each. That carries a memory overhead.

Worth considering as well that, to paraphrase Scott Spencer, using a displacement map on a low-res mesh is like trying to project detail through a blanket. If you use render subD to get a finer mesh then it's like projecting through silk - but again, that carries a memory hit as each subD level quadruples the mesh plus it doubles again when the render engine triangulates it.

So when a high level of detail is required from a figure, it would seem a lot simpler to just start with a base resolution that can support that goal. One size fits all is an approach that just doesn't work in practice, and based on what I have seen and done in Poser and Zbrush, my opinion is that ultimately mesh detail beats map detail.

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