V4 is, first of all, not a scan or recreation of one person. It is a mixture of at least 3-4 people's full-body scans, partial scans of a couple more folks, plus a bit of imagination. Some of it came from scans of live people (the aforementioned human beings), some of it came from the minds of the mesh-mongers @ DAZ (oh, and Chris Creek was only one of many who made v4 what it became.) If I remember right, the funny part was that for awhile I could meet at least one of the people that some of the body parts came from. For example, the foot shape came from a scan of the receptionist's feet at the time - hell if I can remember her name, but from all recollection she was a real sweetheart of a person. Most of the scans (full or partial) came from scans of professional local models though if memory serves - release forms and all.

Anyway, the scans were all brought together, cleaned up, stitched together, and then the topology (and a lot of the shaping) was re-worked, top-to-bottom, as a whole. It actually got overhauled multiple times as joints were worked-over and built to remove (or at least minimize) all the garbage and headaches that the V3/A3/S3/you-name-it 'Unimesh' mesh had (a big example was the leg bending nightmares). It was also the first mesh where genitalia was actually part of the equation until it was ready (then it was removed and set aside as an add-on, not really because Utah, but mostly so that a kid-friendly version of it could remain on-the-table for schools and such).

That's about the extent of my (faulty, crusty, old, etc) knowledge of V4, but I hope you find it useful.

It survived for one hell of a long time, I agree. I think Poser would have died without it, truth be told, and given that people STILL make stuff for it, it is likely one of the largest reasons Poser still has a spark of life in it. Maybe Femme/Homme will change that, but we'll know for sure with time.

It took me awhile to come over to the Genesis Dark Side, but mostly because I waited for, then got, a means to transfer a lot of my fave characters over from v4 to Genesis 2 (IIRC? I think it was 2), and I've been able to transfer the shapes faithfully ever since, all the way up to G8.