I rigged the 4k and 17k LOD versions of the V4 OBJ by loading the OBJ into a new Poser scene, switching to the Setup tab, and selecting the regular base V4 from the Figures library as the "donor" skeleton. Then I applied the Base and Morphs++ morph packages as per usual. Some of them continued to work, while others didn't, mainly in areas where the morph relied on more geometry than was present in the LOD version.

Aside from a weird "sticky vertex" issue in the lip that kicks in with a particular open mouth dial (can't recall which ATM), I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was and how well it worked! Conforming clothes work just fine, as would dynamic, and of course hair always works (esp. if you always parent it rather than conforming rigged hair).

I don't recall about the 17k version, but I think the 4k version has fewer material zones, so even though existing skin materials will work, you might get a message about the material file having "missing zones." Because I was setting up these LOD versions for use as background characters, I just set my own lower-res skin materials and saved them specifically for use on the LOD versions.

I think that that the reason V4 came with OBJs in varying levels of detail is b/c DAZ Studio had a way to enable you to switch between the options, depending on how far in the background the figure would be. Poser doesn't have anything like that, but it's not that hard to just rig an LOD yourself, since you don't actually have to do any rigging; you're just copying the V4 rig onto a new OBJ.

Note: I think I tried using Sasha-16 as the donor at some point, in hopes that the LOD version would receive her weight-mapping, but it didn't work (nor should I have expected it to, really, but I learn a lot just by experimenting!)

Speaking of experimenting: if your goal is to have more V4's in a scene without having Poser slow down, then poly count probably isn't the problem. Based on my experiments, the slow down is far more likely to come from having lots of morph packages installed in each V4 AND having lots of conforming clothing items on each of them. Poser has to constantly think about what to do when any one of those morph dials is activated, and after a while it will have a brain meltdown! So the secret there is to keep each V4 to the bare minimum required to get the look you want.

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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