Hmm... got the free basic Dawn this evening and.... meh.   She does not seem to be at all compatible with Poser 6, so until I can afford to upgrade Dawn is pretty much useless for me.

Still I attempted to experiment with her somewhat, but I could not get her morphs to load correctly.  First, it requirse that I have PMD enabled, something I normally have disabled because its always been buggy.  Minor annoyance.  So then I loaded the morphs, many of them were broken in Poser 6.  This may simply be a version issue; they do say she requires Poser 9+, which means those of use using Poser 8 or older are just out of luck.

Okay so I can't use Dawn until I upgrade... got it.  Would have liked to see more backwards compatability (I think there are still a lot who don't have P9+) but I get that may not have been possible.

But I was still curious about her so next I imported her mesh into Blender to have a look at how she was built.  And again I wasn't all that impressed.

Vicky 4 has 68498 vertices and 66,830 polys.  A quick check with Blender's MeshLint shows that there are no tri's or ngons in Vicky's mesh.

Dawn had 39096 vertices and 39,326 polys, a bit lighter (about 40%).  A quick check with Blender's MeshLint shows she has 1702 tri's in her mesh.

I was surprised by this, there should not have been any tri's in her mesh at all.  Many of the tris are in her arms and legs (there are also clusters in her ears and the front of her neck).  What was more surprising was seeing examples of two tris next to each other that easily could have be made into a quad with the removal of a single edge, not sure why they didn't do that.  Its going to be interesting to see how this affects the mesh in the future with morphs, and especially applying subdivision in Poser, etc.  Personally, I would have preferred and expected a mesh made of pure quads for any sort of organic model (people, creatures, clothing, etc.); that's just the standard in organic modelling now.

The lower poly count could be a plus however.  With newer versions of Poser being able to subdivide for smoothing this could reduce the strain when rendering scenes with mutliple figures.  You can add poly's with subdivision but even with full blown modelling software its a pain to reduce them.  Though it may not be much of an advantage as its generally not polygon counts that slow renders in Poser / DS / Lux down but the large textures and transmaps (transmaps really put a strain on most rendering engines which is why you get such a slow down when you add hair).

Oh, and if you're a fan of big eyelashes, looks like the Dawn has the potential to have some HUGE eyelashes (and by huge I mean crazy up past her eyebrows huge).

Her mesh does look dense enough to add a genital crease, but probably not a very good one.  So if you need full nude renders you're probably still better off with V4.

So to recap..

... can't use her with anything less than Poser 9

... morphs require PMDs, even the INJ files require it, struck me as odd and mildy annoying.

... mesh has a lot of tri's that it probably shouldn't have

... on the plus side the lower poly count may help slightly with renders

I'm finding it hard to get excited about her.  Not surprising since I don't have the minimum software to be able to use her, that definitely puts a damper on it.  But even with newer software, wish the morph INJ files worked like all the other INJ files I have and did not require I have PMD active.  Also, I'm suspicious of all those tris.

Just have to wait and see how this plays out but for now Vicky 4.2 is still going to be my main girl.