"Forgive my bewilderment, but could you walk me through getting Genesis into Poser in the first place without having to have Studio installed?"

That's easy.

You need of course a version of Poser that can do weightmapping. (Poser 9 or better)

Download the "Genesis Starter essentials" and the "DSON importer for Poser".

Extract the essentials to a new folder on your desktop. Copy everything INSIDE the "content" folder to a new folder. Call that folder "Genesis"

Add that "Genesis" folder as a new runtime to you Poser installation.

Finally install the DSON importer to your actual Poser runtime, so the importer script shows up in your script menu inside Poser.

Now you can simply load Genesis by clicking on it's icon in your new "Genesis" runtime.

 

 

But Genesis' own subdivision is a bit slow in Poser, so if you have PP-2014, you can simply load Genesis and:

1. Disable subdivision via the DSON support script. (Set subdivision OFF)

2. Change figure skinning to UNIMESH. (Figure->Skinning Method->Poser Unimesh)

3. Select the "Body" of your figure and set "Subdivision levels" to "1" for Render.

Genesis will now be unsubdivided (=fast) in preview but subdivided when rendered.

4. Save that copy of Genesis to your figure library, so next time you don't need the DSON importer anymore but load Genesis directly again from the cr2 you just saved.

5. Follow my "Genesis Hacking" No I tutorial for creating other standalone cr2's of Genesis that have only a single morph loaded like "Vicky 5, Mike 5, Teens, etc."

If Genesis loads with all morphs at once, it gets slower and slower over time the more morphs you add, but if you do it like this, Vicky 5 will be even faster than Vicky 4 on your machine.

 

No installation of Studio involved in all of this.

You need just the "DSON importer", which is nothing but a small python script to translate the Genesis files into something Poser can read, and the Genesis figure itself.

But this goes just into a separate runtime, like all the other Poser stuff.