Absolutely; V3 with "modern" updates/content is still my go-to base figure; I use her almost exclusively. Whenever I find V3 content, I snap it up. Still plenty of life left in the old gal if people would still support her.

Quote - "Is there a post or URL for V3WM, Joe? I still use V3 all the time."

Here you go:

Sweet! Thank you!

Quote -  

And if you have PP-2012 or PP-2014 you can also try transferring the weightmaps I made for my V3WM over to her to improve the rigging.

Is there a post or URL for V3WM, Joe? I still use V3 all the time.

I did quite a few experiments with this as my runtime(s) are pretty huge (400 GB uncompressed) and waiting for the libary to refresh drives me crazy. For a long time, I was working with the Poser program and any commonly used geometries installed on the boot drive SSD; with all the other runtimes on a portable HDD (I work on multiple rendering PCs, so I favor the 2.5 inch drives for portablitiy). I tried to speed it up a bit by compressing the runtimes (to get them to fit) then moving them to a RAID 0 SSD array and found it really didn't change a thing as far as responsiveness. Next I tried the uncompressed runtimes on a hybrid hard drive (Seagate Momentus XT) and found that it didn't matter much either, then, I tired it on a normal "speedy" HDD (WD Scorpio black) with an SSD cache on the motherboard and found it didn't do much at all. Poser's library seems to hit a wall at some point where it is not the disk drive bottlenecking it. 

So the conclusion I came to, is that as long as you have a decent SSD that Poser resides on and a good HDD for content, that is probably your best bet.

Quote - I do use V4 and M4, but David and SP3 are still my favorites. 

The original Vicky was a big improvement over Posette, and V3 was a big improvement over V1/2, but I don't see V4 as that big an improvement over V3.

Yeah; I think the law of dimishing returns set in hard between Gen3 and Gen4; I found the Gen4s less realistic and much harder to work with (seriously, what's with all the magnets!?). For my style of art, V3 simply works better.

I still use V3 exclusively; I would certainly love to see what a WM V3 could do. I never warmed up to the Gen4's - resource hogs and faces that look like a plastic doll with that awful "1000 yard stare". It's been harder and harder getting content for V3 anymore, but I've had some success with the conversion tools to keep it fresh - pretty much the only reason I buy V4 content is to convert it to my V3 characters. I for one, woud welcome continued support for the Gen3 figures.

I had the same thought a couple of months ago, and squeezed down my main runtimes to fit on an SSD RAID 0 setup (2 x 128GB PNY drives) expecting it to perform much better than my "normal" external USB 3 connected Seagate Momentus XT storage drive (PoserPro 2012 is installed on my PC's "main" SSD RAID).

Result? Didn't notice much of a difference at all. About the only thing that was faster was when the directory was indexed in Poser, but that was about it. Even then, it was maybe a second faster than the XT. I decided it wasn't worth the loss of storage space and went back to using the Momentus XT.

That said, I did notice a HUGE improvement earlier in performance when I went from having the runtimes on a "normal" 7200 RPM HDD to the Momentus XT (a hybrid SSD and HDD). This solution is still the best I've that I've found so far, as the XT gets almost the same performance (in Poser) as the SSD RAID while still having plenty of space.

V3 is still my girl; I still use her almost exclusively for my female figures, and with updated "fixes", custom morphs & shaders, I think the results I get from her are still far better than V4 (I never could get over V4's "plastic" looking face and body, not to mention memory hogging mags and morphs). I would love to see a weight mapped version of V3; heck, I still buy content for V3 if I can find any.

Quote - > Quote - What spec system do you have now, and what are you thinking of , also what version of poser ? 

I am using Poser 6 with almost exclusively the Poser 4 rendering. I am going from about a dual core 2.3 Ghz prosessor with 4GB ram and a crappy video card (I can only approximate because it died three weeks ago) to a 3.2 Ghz Intel core i5 650 with 8GB ram and for a graphics card a NVIDIA GeForce GT320 with 1GB of dedicated video memory. In order for this to be worth it to me it will have to be a very signficant speed increase, close to triple. Could I reasonably expect those results? From what I read in this thread it doesn't seem like the graphics card will make much of a difference.

That Octane program looks awesome! It is just too bad it doesn't seem compatible with Poser. Otherwise I would buy that thing in a second. That is the kind of results I would love.

Unless you are planning on upgrading Poser going to a new PC wouldn't benefit you that much performance wise as your biggest bottleneck is going to be Poser 6 itself. P6 can't use multiple threads for rendering and is limited to 2GB a thread (32-bit app).  In order to take advantage of the newer hardware, you really need to be working in Poser Pro and above with the Firefly render engine on a 64-bit operating system.

I still use V3 almost exclusively. I've never really warmed up to V4.

I'll have to try that. It's very weird...I've noticed it will do that even after it a completely new scene has been loaded. Hopefully they get this fixed in the next SR.

Quote - > Quote - [But personally, when I buy a character set, I very rarely use the morph. The primary thing I look for is a good quality texture.

And FWIW, the V4 mesh was not "merged" with Aiko and the Girl. Those products were added on as morphs to her mesh long after her creation, and the same could probably have been done with the Gen 3 figures if DAZ had really wanted to (not sure about rigging tho).

I think a good majority of us buy for the texture more than the morph.

They could have done the same with Gen 3 figures. As long as it's the same mesh and the same grouping.

What I meant by them "merging" V4 with Aiko is that it seems to me that V4  basically was shaped from the get-go to be more "cartoon" like then V3 or V2. To me, V4's default body and face looks a heck of a lot more like A3. Some may like that, I don't. She's way too skinny and rubbery looking and her face has this constant "thousand yard stare" look. Again, some may like this, I don't.

I  also mostly just use the texture sets and some head morphs from character sets. The other part of my annoyance with V4 is the fact that they basically grouped the morph dials by morph sets  (morph ++, elite, etc)  rather then by function or body part (I know you can probably re-arrange this somehow, but still). And those @@#$#! magnet sets to conform....GRRRRRRR....

Quote - IMO, I didn't see anything wrong with V3. (I don't think she should have been dumped on the side of the road.)
"She's my main working figure" 

Same here. I really do not like V4 at all, even after all these years of trying to use her. There are enough morphs and fixes for V3 that IMHO, makes her more realistic looking and able to move and bend just as well as V4. I think it was a huge mistake to merge the V4 mesh with Aiko and the Girl...the end result is the supposed "realistic" woman just looks way too soft and 'toon like to me (and is it just me, or does it seems like 95% of the V4 characters for sale here seem to be some variation of the "racoon eyed lolita' doll...they don't look like a real woman at all).

For my work, V3 is still by far my #1 girl. I wished that there were more products still being made for her; when I see the odd V3 item here in the marketplace or at CP I snap it up. Just 'cause she's old doesn't mean she's used up!!

I have D:S Advanced, but I hardly ever use it; most of my characters and scenes were made using Poser's material shaders and lights so importing them into DS is a non-starter. That, coupled with the lack of python script support which I use a lot, mean DS gathers a lot of dust on my hard drive.
I don't see anything majorly wrong with it; but it doesn't work well for me. Stability wise, I would say it's worse than Poser, but  that's not really saying much (PPro has been the best stability wise thus far of all the version I've used).

I usually recommend newbies to start off with DS just because it's free, but to move up to Poser because of the better support and advanced features (IMHO). Poser is still the standard and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Ah! That worked. Thanks.