SeanMartin posted at 7:27PM Tue, 21 August 2018 - #4334200

True, he has his limitations, but it's like restoring a Model T and letting it have some fun all over again.

I really love what Sean does with these older figures, but that's most likely b/c his work falls within a spectrum from "stylized to comic book" and that's the aesthetic I most enjoy in Poser renders. If your goal is to produce work like that, then you don't have much need for a skin texture that's "technically correct" down to the last pore (and so huge that it eats up half your texture cache!). Indeed, you might find that an older, lower-res, slightly more "airbrushed" skin, run through EZSkin for the awesome procedural bump + spec, is actually "better" for your purposes.

In other words, what we each consider "better" in a texture or model depends on what style we're aiming for when we put scenes together to render. If your goal is to produce photo-realistic renders, then you probably do need to use the newest stuff, as it's always improving towards that end. But if that's not your goal, then you can get a lot of good use out of older content, esp. if you can tweak it to take advantage of newer rendering technologies (SSS, IDL, etc.)

My primary figure is V4, and I now use the Sasha-16 version (which has a bunch of amazingly useful dials I wish all figures had, including height control), but even before I ever tried out a weight-mapped version of V4 I very rarely had problems with her bends b/c I put her in everyday clothes and everyday poses (nothing nude or extreme). I also very rarely had (and still rarely have) problems getting clothes and hair to fit or crafting a variety of different characters out of the ++/A4/G4 morph sets (plus Faerime). Most importantly, I just like working with her, as I've gotten to know how she works well enough that it's easy for me to get what I want with a few turns of the dials.

I've never used V3, but I do have Aiko 3 and find her very cute. If someone reorganized/improved her dials the way Karina did with the Sasha-16 version of V4, I'd use her a lot more often!

So I totally understand the preference for "older" figures, and it's too bad that it's so hard to find some of the older items made for them. Some folks have shared their items as freebies, but others have disappeared. The good news is, the kind of person who likes using the older figures is typically also the kind of person who doesn't mind using various hacks and tweaks to get newer stuff to work with them!

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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