Hello WandW! :-)

While I weightmapped my LOD's ffrom scratch "just for the heck of it", I think it's easiest to start with an already weightmapped V4. Weightmapps easily transfer from a higher res to a lower res figure of similar topology.

Sometimes there might be minimal editing needed, but nothing the morphbrush couldn't handle.

Same with morphs. For example the sticky vertice that perpetualrevision encountered while transferring over a smile morph, can easily be "tamed" with a little "smoothing" by the morphbrush.

In my 20yrs of Posering on low-end hardware, I think the biggest "resource hogs" are high res textures.Think about it: Unless you render your figure at super-high-end resolution at an insanely huge size, 90% of those 4K x 4K textures are just wasted, because the render engine just blurrs it all out.

So while I keep a copy of the original textures, of course, my "working textures" are 1200 x 1200 at most. Sometimes even less. (Unless it is a ground texture that can't be tiled)

Polygon reduction is still quite effective to save precious RAM, as Poser (Unlike Studio), loads all morphs it can find in a cr2 permanently into memory. So a high res figure with lots of morphs can quickly eat up a lot of memory before you even start rendering it.