Um, just to say, the reason to look beyond V4 is liking to buy content at all. DAZ doesn't want to support Poser. Rendo has much less than 1/2 the inventory DAZ does because of their clearance policy, so older products are disappearing. Rendo PTB are pushing DS and G3 support. At some point they're probably going to stop accepting V4 content. Even if most of the Poser community stays on V4, there just won't be enough people buying the same V4 content for V4 products to sell but so well. HiveWire and RDNA are the only brokerages currently making an effort to support Poser, and even RDNA is promoting G3 products pretty damn hard.

Maybe I'm misreading things, but most posts seem to view supporting a non-DAZ figure as some sort of kindness or charity to the figure creator. Thing is, we invested millions in the Vicky line to make it what it is today. We did that just to get V4 to what she is almost a full decade after her release. No single creator is going to be able to match all that money and all that community support before anyone else buys in.

V1 was lower quality than anything I've seen in a long time, and it's not as if that was only due to technological limitations. It wasn't her resolution, it was her shape. Computers had no problem handling all the morphs that V2 added. Her mapping could actually have been more efficient, and certainly could have had less stretching. And both she and V2 were very expensive. But instead of focusing on her weaknesses, the community focused on her possibilities. And on that community support, DAZ built a very lucrative figure-based content monopoly.

Now they're leaving the Poser community behind, which was predictable from the moment they made DS. There's perfectly good figures to start supporting right now, like Dawn and Dusk. But people keep saying they're going to wait until they have the kind of support the fourth version of a figure got in their 10th year. Thing is, no figure will have that level of support without at least half as much community investment to get it there.

Brokerages and vendors can survive just selling DS content, or other kinds of 3D content altogether. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Poser can survive selling outside the content community. I certainly saw more people using Poser outside of these forums and galleries than inside, and that was only watching one class in one department at one university. They certainly have options to grow outside of this content community, and I'm very sure it would be possible, if difficult, to do.

The only people I see without many choices if the community doesn't support a non-DAZ figure are Poser customers who want new content. Vendors can't support V4 indefinitely, even if they want to, because brokerages can't. There's just not enough money in making a few more things for a figure that's got a ton of content and just as many limitations. Even freebies will be hit hard if all the vendors switch to DS, because a whole lot of the freebies are made by vendors. So unless you do want to make all your own content (a perfectly viable, but usually rare, option) or switch to DS (which I'd expect anyone willing to have done already), you need a non-DAZ figure to get community and brokerage support.

Which isn't going to happen if we sit back and wait for someone (or even a whole company of someones) to achieve the same thing that took the whole community years of work, millions of dollars, and several revisions to achieve. We're at what I call a Tetris point. Not making a decision is making a decision.

Wolf359, why do you still post here? For years now, all you've said in each post, over and over, is how terrible Poser and its figures are, and how you don't use it any more. I'm very sure I first saw you say this years ago now. By your own account you don't use Poser, and your posts never involve any solutions beyond not using Poser any more. You've voiced your opinion about Poser at least hundreds of times now. We all know it. You've gotten it across. And it's cool that you don't like Poser, and have found tools that suit you and your needs. But this is a Poser forum, not a DS forum or a C4D forum. This forum is for Poser users who want to help other Poser users. What are you trying to achieve? I genuinely don't understand what you want, and why you keep posting the same negative message all over the Poser forums. Wouldn't you rather go to the forums for the software you do use and post how great it is? Why do keep telling us why you hate the software we use?