Thanks to everyone for the replies and esp. to ironsoul for running those tests of V4 as a figure vs. an object.

It makes sense that several aspects of figures might slow down Poser in ways that aren't applicable to props--such as morphs and conformers. I only have what I consider the "core" morph packages installed (Morphs++ and Aiko/Hiro), plus a few individual Faerime face morphs depending on the character, and I removed all of Sasha's KV stuff. So I don't think I can trim down any further there. As for conformers, I need way too many different poses (and I fiddle with poses too often) to use dynamic clothes, but I can experiment with making conforming items invisible until I'm mostly finished with posing to see if that helps.

Yesterday I was working on a scene with two V4 characters, each riding a HW Horse along a trail in 2nd World's Park and Nature Scene. I set up each horse/rider pair in their own scene file, parented each rider's hip to their horse's abdomen, and saved each group to the figures library. My thinking was that by the time I added them to the scene file, they'd already be posed and I would only need to translate the horses a bit to get them to the right spot.

But after I loaded them, I saw that both V4s had weird poke-through in their shirts, their feet had moved out of place in the stirrups, and their hands were no longer holding the reins but hovering above them. In other words, much of the work that had gone into posing them in separate files (and using the morph brush on spots of poke-through) had been for naught, as I had a lot more work to do. And the posing was incredibly tedious b/c by then Poser was barely responding to turns of the dials (even though the only items visible in the scene were those necessary for posing). It was maddening!!

I understand that textures and shaders can also slow down Poser's performance in Preview mode, but I had Hardware Shading turned off, Preview Texture Size set to 512, and items with transparency (hair, manes, tails) set to wireframe display. So shouldn't that make textures less of a factor while in Preview mode?

I bought a new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro specifically to make it easier to work with Poser, but other than Firefly renders being much faster, there's no real improvement over my 2013 MacBook Pro, which is certainly disappointing. I use Cheetah3D for modeling and texturing, and it can handle WAY more stuff than Poser before there's any impact on performance, so I wonder there's something about Poser that's just not optimized for Macs?

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles