What figure do you use the most in your renders for Poser? I've listed 9 figures by name and 1 for other. Double names are either based on, or morphs of, another figure. If you don't see the name of the figure you use THE MOST, please write down the name of that figure. I would prefer you keep your choices to just one figure, but if you honestly use more than one figure a lot, knock yourself out. Also, for the purposes of this survey, Male figures are separate figures. Just write them under Other.

1. Roxie
2. V4/ Sasha
3. Anastasia/ Alyson
4. Pauline
5. Dawn
6. Sydney/ Jessie
7. Project E.
8. La Femme
9. Genesis
10. Other

2, 10 James

5 Dawn, 10 M4

For quick images, I use V4 or Sasha because I have plenty of content for her. For images I'm taking me time on, I'll also use Dawn, PE and La Femme. I like variety.

I suppose V4 with the following morph packages is my goto figure, and is really all I have ever needed:

• V4 Morphs++ (By DAZ)
• V4 Muscle Morphs (By DAZ)
• V4 Natural Breast Morphs (By Posermatic)

So that is my goto figure (strictly when injected with those morph packs), which I use to get me in the right ballpark of any look and body type I'm after. I then use the Poser Morph Brush to make any facial and joint adjustments I need, while the figure is posed.

For the Male, I use M4 with the male equivalent of those morph packs (Obviously Excluding Natural Breast Morphs).

Melody for Aiko 3

What can I say? She (oy, here I am ascribing "personality" to a collection of data) has the base structure and morph additions that has allowed me to recreate two favorite OCs in polygonal form.

Sincerely,

Bill

M4

Bella

V3 and V4

M3 and M4

Dawn

K4

Victoria 4 Victoria 3 Michael 4 Michael 3

For work and play, Posette.

For blogging, Rikugame's Kona (seen in the avatar to the left)

Genesis, but mostly Genesis 2 female and male

1. M4

I really like weightmapped David, but at this point there's just so much more stuff for M4, he's the one I end up using.

Back in the days I was using DS, it was V4 mostly, with Steph 4 on occasion, though I was still using V4 after returning to Poser 7 years ago.

In the past 6-7 years, it's been Dawn, and occasionally Dusk.

In the past 14 months, I've been using La Femme "almost" as often as I use Dawn.

1. V4 (WM version)

2, 7 and 8.

Still V4, now as Sasha-16. I'm a little more all over the board with male figures.

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

I'm pretty much brand-new to the Poser ecosystem and, similar to when I was first learning about DS, I'm curious when or why certain figures might be preferred over others, etc. In DS, I learned how in some scenarios, the newest options aren't necessarily the best ones.

@ TwoCatsYelling : Yes, You answered your own question

1,2,6,8,9 and 10.. anyone actually, I have no "go to" figure

TwoCatsYelling posted at 3:47PM Mon, 09 March 2020 - #4383017

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

I'm pretty much brand-new to the Poser ecosystem and, similar to when I was first learning about DS, I'm curious when or why certain figures might be preferred over others, etc. In DS, I learned how in some scenarios, the newest options aren't necessarily the best ones.

Yes. I have Project E, Dawn and the new girl ;), but to knock out something quick, I got to what I have muscle memory for. And that's V4. Face it, she has several metric tons of assets available.

Kon, of course

1. V4/M4/K4 - because I have a set of characters I use a lot
2. La Femme/L'Homme - because they are so versatile and I love working with them!
3. Project E - because she is amazing!!
4. Paul/Pauline - because they are better than most folks give them credit for
5. Legacy figures - Jessi, James, Judy (3Dream's Eternal Judy) Don, Sydney, Simon ... etc)
6. Other figures I'm starting to experiment with (i.e. Dawn, Dusk, E2, Orion and Venus)

Common play: 8 ,7, 1 in that order.

However lately more and more 10, as the mood strikes go up the attic and open some long-closed boxes: Blow the dust off Miki2, or see how Antonia is doing.
.

Wow, almost forgot about the Miki series, Olivia, Kelvin and Koji!! I use them regularly too.

V4 and M4

Recently? Sasha 16, Glidman's (controversial) Ayana Doll (Terai Y ;), A3...

But I've just returned to Poser and I'm enjoying all the new rigging tools so it's the Poser Pro Medium Res Female for learning weight painting and JCM creation, she's "open source".

I like variety, so I use different figures all the time: Sasha, La Femme, Genesis 2 female, PE, Dawn, and Pauline. For males, it’s mainly M4, and some use of Dusk and Paul. I never use the legacy figures, though back when I used Poser 10, I created body doubles using Posette for scenes with a lot of figures.

Don't really have one; it depends on the look I'm going for at the time.

Well, guess I'll answer this one as well. Dawn and Dusk are my current Go to figures. In the past, primarily Roxie, V4, Alyson, and Miki 4. Ironically, males in the past have been mostly Michael 3. I find him more expressionable and easy to pose.

7, 8.

I use PE 90% of the time simply because the default shape is very naturally average (which is the type of style I prefer) and I don't have to do much to her because she already looks like the every day person. I use LF for certain things, close up face shots but tend to shy away from body shots because LF's body type isn't average and I have to do a lot to Un-LaFemme, LaFemme.

1. Sasha-16 / V4 / M4

I look forward to working with La Femme and L Homme as we get better acquainted.

1. V4 - purely because 90% of the stuff in my runtime is for her.

7 Project Evolution, and genesis 2's sometimes for females, and for the males M4 and genesis 2, but actually I use a lot of them

TwoCatsYelling posted at 6:16AM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383017

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

I'm pretty much brand-new to the Poser ecosystem and, similar to when I was first learning about DS, I'm curious when or why certain figures might be preferred over others, etc. In DS, I learned how in some scenarios, the newest options aren't necessarily the best ones.

All the above, naturally. :)

I collect new figures because I consider them resources, actors in whatever I am animating. There are very few people comparatively who can take a figure and morph it enough to where its difficult to tell it was 'Figure X'. Dial spinning doesn't really change that (newest example is LaFemme/LaHomme. Despite the gender change, you can tell it is the same mesh). You have to choose carefully, of course; some 'actors' are only good for face shots, some head and shoulders, etc. due to how the creator worked the topology and rigging. I'm a writer and movie maker, so my needs are quite different from the people who concentrate solely on still images (of course I do that too when creating a character and storyboarding). It was why I paired Vue with Poser; I could animate the figures, then import it into a Vue scene and render there, giving me a non static natural environment, or a more flexible internal render (at least until Cycles was added to Poser). How well the figure bends when a motion file is applied, and how much tweaking is needed are more vital than a lot of things stills need, since you can hide a vast number of sins behind some dynamic clothing

Dale B posted at 6:35AM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383091

TwoCatsYelling posted at 6:16AM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383017

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

What you hear after a request like that is the sound of a submarine "DIVE DIVE DIVE" lmao

2 V4

Dale B posted at 7:46AM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383091

I collect new figures because I consider them resources, actors in whatever I am animating. There are very few people comparatively who can take a figure and morph it enough to where its difficult to tell it was 'Figure X'. Dial spinning doesn't really change that (newest example is LaFemme/LaHomme. Despite the gender change, you can tell it is the same mesh). You have to choose carefully, of course; some 'actors' are only good for face shots, some head and shoulders, etc. due to how the creator worked the topology and rigging. I'm a writer and movie maker, so my needs are quite different from the people who concentrate solely on still images (of course I do that too when creating a character and storyboarding). It was why I paired Vue with Poser; I could animate the figures, then import it into a Vue scene and render there, giving me a non static natural environment, or a more flexible internal render (at least until Cycles was added to Poser). How well the figure bends when a motion file is applied, and how much tweaking is needed are more vital than a lot of things stills need, since you can hide a vast number of sins behind some dynamic clothing

A caveat if I may "emptor" here, please, I originally bought my first version of Poser (2) for use in animation. At that time, there were no "Legacy" figures. There are now, of course, and no I don't collect figures, but I do like variety. That's why I like the Legacy figures. For me, at least, they're easy to pose, and most of them come with their own wardrobe, small though it maybe. I mention this because Legacy figures are great for background shots and building crowd scenes in Poser. As anyone who's ever tried to build a crowd in Poser knows, that poser does not have instancing, so every new figure you add to a scene, even if you duplicate it, slows Poser down considerably. Legacy figures are also usually lower polys than the newer figures, so I like to use figures like Posette, Don, Dork and Judy as, say, background diners and waiters in a restaurant scene. I once had a ballroom scene that slowed my Poser down to a crawl. Don't forget, it's not just the figures that slow poser down, but the props as well.

EldritchCellar posted at 12:38PM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383058

Recently? Sasha 16, Glidman's (controversial) Ayana Doll (Terai Y ;), A3...

But I've just returned to Poser and I'm enjoying all the new rigging tools so it's the Poser Pro Medium Res Female for learning weight painting and JCM creation, she's "open source".

Sick as the proverbial parrot that I didn't get me hands on Ayana when it was available. :(

1. V4

V4 M4 - I do "furry" / anthropomorphic figures mainly and use Sparky"s morphs for V4 and M4

I'm a little stunned and surprised by how many people are still using V4.

EClark1894 posted at 2:14AM Wed, 11 March 2020 - #4383177

I'm a little stunned and surprised by how many people are still using V4.

I'm not. It was a massively well supported figure and there's a lot of content, compared to almost every other figure out there. I use it now and again - the WM version - but most of the time, I tend to use Sasha-16 if I want a V4 type. Then again, I often use V2 and V3 and even the old Stephanie. They're all useful in their own ways and it's not like they go bad through old age.

I'm not.

V4 still is figure with the most content available, and which most people already have in their runtimes, Easy to use, without the need to have to jump though innumerable hoops just to get the figure wear a basic a pantie. Let alone a dress!

With all the drawbacks of conforming clothes, the way Poser handles dynamic clothing is an absolute show.stopper for anyone new to Poser. Why not have a look at "the other program" to learn how this could be handled?

I for one, will stick to "conforming", or (if I come across a piece of dynamic cloth - which is basically a simple prop), I' ll try to convert the prop to a conforming figure because it's so much easier to handle, compared to endless simulations ran from "guess-what-this-value-does" interfaces.

And now you wonder why people not jump the "new- & shining figures" bandwagon - with "clothing" that in 80% of the time they may have to guess obscure values in the Cloth Room and run endless simulations all day long just to get a half-way decent render at the end of the week?

Say, in which reality do YOU people live in???

Think about it!

Peter

EDIT: crossposted with Sam... :/

TwoCatsYelling posted at 8:43PM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383017

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

Female

1. Jessi/Sydney/Olivia/Miki 2
2. P6 Jessi/Miki 1020
3. Gen 3 Females - Victoria 3/Stephanie Petite/Laura
4. Dawn
5. V4 - (40+ characters, non-Caucasians)
6. Alyson 1/2
7. Pauline
8. Miki 3/4
9. Antonia
10. Genesis 1/2/3 (mainly for kids - and non-humans)
11. Project Evolution
12. Kez/Mariko/Eroko/Eternal Judy/Maya Doll/My Michelle/The Girl

Male

1. James/Simon/Koji/Kelvin
2. M3/Luke
3. Apollo Maximus
4. D3
5. Dusk
6. Rikishi
7. Tyler
8. M2
9. Rex

If an artist only uses 1 base mesh, they are going to be pretty limited - even if that mesh is Victoria 4.

As you can see, I tend to run with the SM figures. They are literally the only normal sized figures available, (outside of SP3 & D3). For me, clothing content has been irrelevant since PhilC released Wardrobe Wizard back in the Poser 6 era. I have been all in on clothing conversion systems since that time. Most of my clothing was made for V4, but hey, between WW, Xdresser, and the fitting room - any outfit can go onto any figure.

Dynamic Clothing is only a show stopper if you are aggressively uninterested in learning how it works - every tool has a learning curve. The issue with dynamic clothing is the interface. We never could get Steve Cooper to understand that the only people who understood the interface was the Poser Development team. Hopefully, the new Poser team will spend some quality time on the interface to make it more user friendly.

It was a problem back in the Poser 5/6 era, when hobbyist level computers simply didn't have the horses to run the simulator..

I am working on a series of graphic novels based on Star Trek (the original series) I need everybody in the same outfit (V4 Courageous/M4 Valiant - except for Dusk - I commissioned the SFO outfit from Poser World for him - your welcome.)

Why do I use so many different figures? Let me let you in on a little secret.

Go look at characters - with almost every vendor, if you own 3 of their characters - you own all of their characters. Most of them look like siblings to each other. There isn't actually a need to buy that 4th character. By using characters based on different meshes, I don't get that "family reunion look" in a group scene - and almost all of my scenes are group scenes..

If you need anything outside of early 20's Caucasians, you need to have a wide variety of base meshes.

I have started to work the G figure into my cast of characters. I need children & we haven't had that in Poser since Luke/Laura. I also need older characters - all post V4 characters are from Logan's Run. I need more than 1 non-Caucasian. I need older non-Caucasians. I need younger non-Caucasians. The Genesis figures have a much wider variety of races and body styles. They are a pain to move into Poser, but once you get the conversion system down, they can be pretty lightweight. I would prefer to continue using just Poser native figures, but that simply isn't going to happen - there is no variety.

The Poser/DS universe is about 95% Caucasian - and the non-Caucasians get Caucasianized by vendors - I have been around a lot of Asians - I have never in my 56 years seen one with blue eyes - ditto African Americans. It went from annoying to creepy a long, long time ago.

ssgbryan posted at 5:29AM Wed, 11 March 2020 - #4383191

The Poser/DS universe is about 95% Caucasian - and the non-Caucasians get Caucasianized by vendors - I have been around a lot of Asians - I have never in my 56 years seen one with blue eyes - ditto African Americans. It went from annoying to creepy a long, long time ago.

For the record, I'm black and no, I don't remember ever, in my 62 years on this planet, ever seeing a blue-eyed African-American, or any other black person for that matter, but I have seen one with green eyes. Grew up with him. Not a member of my family, but knew him from the neighborhood. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though. Remember, though it's something that not many people know nowadays, there are some black people who are passing as white.

Eye colour is a fascinating subject in its own right. ISTR reading that blue eyes are the result of a genetic error, so I guess it's possible for any ethnicity to have 'em, although it's more prevalent in Caucasians.

EClark1894 posted at 11:20AM Wed, 11 March 2020 - #4383177

I'm a little stunned and surprised by how many people are still using V4.

I am not really surprised but it does make me wonder about all the clamour there is for a new figure when there is a new version of Poser being developed. If lots of people are not using the new figures perhaps the development time would be better spent on adding new features to Poser and improving the existing ones. If someone is still using V4 because there is a vast amount of clothing for her, which there is, that suggests that she is mainly used clothed. If that is the case better bending is not that big a deal which is what most new figures developed concentrated on.

How many figures you use is very dependant on what you use Poser for, in my case I use it mainly for storytelling so the main character remains the same. As the heroine is Dawn based that is what I use the most, I do use other figures but only in the role of 'extras' so that might be V4, V3 or even Scarlett based. I used to use V4 as my go to figure but I also love doing portraits and I found it easier to create more convincing expressions with Dawn than with V4. Portraits do not generally need a massive wardrobe so the fact V4 has some many clothes is not really a major plus.

I use V4 and M4 a lot because there is so much content for them. A lot of it free.

And it's not just clothing. It's textures. If you're trying to get a likeness of a specific person, textures make a huge difference. Dawn and LF just don't have enough textures (particularly nonwhite, or suitable for anyone not college-aged).

As an extra thought - any robot based on a human figure - will involve A3, V3, M3 and V4.

hornet3d posted at 1:39PM Wed, 11 March 2020 - #4383203

I am not really surprised but it does make me wonder about all the clamour there is for a new figure when there is a new version of Poser being developed. If lots of people are not using the new figures perhaps the development time would be better spent on adding new features to Poser and improving the existing ones. If someone is still using V4 because there is a vast amount of clothing for her, which there is, that suggests that she is mainly used clothed. If that is the case better bending is not that big a deal which is what most new figures developed concentrated on.

How many figures you use is very dependant on what you use Poser for, in my case I use it mainly for storytelling so the main character remains the same. As the heroine is Dawn based that is what I use the most, I do use other figures but only in the role of 'extras' so that might be V4, V3 or even Scarlett based. I used to use V4 as my go to figure but I also love doing portraits and I found it easier to create more convincing expressions with Dawn than with V4. Portraits do not generally need a massive wardrobe so the fact V4 has some many clothes is not really a major plus.

I use Poser for story telling - mine has an ensemble cast, so I need a lot of folks that don't look like they are closely related.

We get new characters because there is a contingent of folks that want something that bends better than V4 (before all of it's fixes).

The problem is that vendor support for new figures is, to be charitable, spotty. Part of this is vendor intransigence i.e. I only make what I am personally interested in. The other is Poser's ability to add new features to any mesh the end user wants to use.

Any legacy figure can have newer tech added to it. We also have the ability to retrofit any figure asset to whichever figure catches our fancy. If I am using LaFemme or such, it only takes a couple of minutes to convert that V4 outfit for her use. Get LaFemme, or Pauline, or Dawn, or whoever, go over to DAZ, join Platinum Club and get an incredible wardrobe @$1.99 an outfit. Come to 'Rosity, join prime, rinse, lather, repeat. That doesn't leave a lot of money for vendors making newer content. That newer content has to be better than what is already available. And most of it isn't (Sturgeon's Law).

Which means I can spend that money on something else, rather than buying an asset made specifically for that figure - which is a good thing for the end user, not so much for the vendor. If the vendors had gotten behind Dawn, we would all be saying Vicky who? But that is water over the bridge.