I've spent 5 days going through dozens of old Cds... 1999 -2002. I have to say that was a glorious time.  I found hundreds of V2 face & bodymorphs. The freebies were plentiful, and very well made.

I have so much V3 stuff, that I don't really need anymore. All the hair & props fit V2 and she's so much lighter.

Too bad R'osity cleared her out - new people have no idea of what they're missing!

But then, i'm old, LOL!

BillyGoat

The best part is that I was looking for an old P4 Woman corset by PhilC and there iit was, in my account! From 1999!

baaaa...baaaa...baaad billy.

lol! ;P

Mmh... retro? I have V3, Jessi, Miki, TY2... but I still use V2 in my recent pics

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1302135

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1276945

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1273962

And... I still use Posette ;)

I still think V2 is the "real" Vicki - but don't tell V3.

Well, some threads say the release of V4 is imminent...

Ya know, you're right.

Whilst I've been using V3 alot, there is just something about Victoria 2.

the only bad thing ybout V2 is that noone seems to take the trouble to make textures for her any more.:crying:

With UTC (Universal Texture Converter), textures for V2 shouldn't be a problem.
DPH

Things were different when V1 and V2 was new
People was doing things for fun offering great quality free stuff
Now everyone wants to make money from poser selling low quality stuff and of course the quality of the free stuff now is even worst...

V2 LoRes was my first Victoria and she is fantastic! As light as posette and looks great under P5/P6 smooth render (like my Nea! :biggrin:) Still the most clothes on my Runtime are for her!

But you know I'm also old on this site and still trying to give Posette new life with Nea... so think of me as an oldfashion weird guy...

"V2 LoRes was my first Victoria and she is fantastic!"

I completely agree.

V2LO has in my opinion the most smart and economic head geometry of all DAZ characters. They really made each vertice count.
Her lightweight mesh also makes custom morphing really enjoyable.

Stahlratte

Great face morph!!!
Is it firefly smooth render Stahlratte ?

"Is it firefly smooth render Stahlratte ?"

Nope, just plain ol'  P4 ProPack Renderer.
(And no postwork, either)

I personally don´t like Firefly very much and avoid using it whenever I can.  ;-)

Stahlratte

Quote - Things were different when V1 and V2 was new
People was doing things for fun offering great quality free stuff
Now everyone wants to make money from poser selling low quality stuff and of course the quality of the free stuff now is even worst...

True...

Ask a question these day about how to do any given something, and people answer with comments about becomming a merchant...

It's becomes so commercial its absurd, sometimes I have to wonder if I'm the last actual artist standing...

One thing that will help you get through all of V2 Face files is a python, by Ockham, called FC2Dial.py.   This will allow you to make a whole dial for any V2 expression/face file, and then adjust it's value accordingly!

I could'nt find a link, but am sure it is a freebie, and attached in the link above.  Just save it to your hard disk as FC2dial.py, and not FC2dial.doc.

Hmm, I could'nt get the file to upload.  Just e-mail me at angelouscuitry@lycos.com if you're interested.

I wholeheartedly agree about V2.  I bought V3 and worked with her for many weeks before finally accepting she did nothing for me: bad joint movements, un-beautifiable face, bizarre mesh problems around the breasts, badly shaped and infixable hips.

V2 has her limitations (e.g. bad knees), but at least you can make her look hot and move well.  So I've been using nothing but customized V2 figures since about two months after V3 came out (Jessie was another major, unmitigatable disappointment).

So here I've been for years with a full wallet and no merchants willing take my money so I can keep my V2's in fresh gear. 

Maybe V4 will cause me to re-open my wallet, but I'm no longer assuming every upgrade is an improvement, or that any new figures are superior to the "obsolete" ones.

My 2 cents ...

Well for me more polygons is for sure no improvement!
V3 didn't made any other great difference from V2...
Apollo is an example that good joints don't need ultra high resolution!

At the end all models after some time can be anything as far as morphing is involved
Now there is every V3 female form variation that you can imagine, but only after hard morphing job...
Characters like kyelo could have been a new figure than a character based on V3!

However for me,starting from an average looking model is the best, and V3 is not average at all...

To end my thought V2 was not beautifull for sure but she was more "average" than V3...

we i started with v1/2 and am happily using her most of the time since.. am old around here too..lol

i wasn't aware that so many still liked/used her... more textures and stuff for her??

you got it!! i got a whole hard drive of custom things i've painted for my own projects.

was thinking of cleaning out and up my site..

may be i'll just dedicate it to the original vicki oo and the milgirls as they are interchangeable i really have enjoyed that the most..

netta

home of the original darkling wear texture addict!!

"So here I've been for years with a full wallet and no merchants willing take my money so I can keep my V2's in fresh gear. "

The free Stephanie I "Maxine" cr2 not only works with Stephanie I, but also with V1, V2, V2LO, Stephanie I LO, and Valerie 2-LO, by just replacing the object references.
That means all of them can wear V3 clothing with very little or no adjustments at all:

Here´s V2 LO wearing one of Serge Marck´s V3 dresses.
Not bad for 18331 vertices, eh ?
(V3 has 72712 vertices)

But of course there ARE situations where you need all the vertices you can get, for example if you want a very slim body where you can actually "count the ribs", or if you want to create
a very muscular body which is properly "ripped".
Also an elderly person needs more polys to create proper wrinkles and folds, or an alien creature needs extra polys to create non-human head shapes.

But for the majority of young, fit, but neither too muscular nor overly slim female characters, standard V3 is most often too heavy, and either V2 or V3 RR will do just fine.  :-)

stahlratte

Uh... Maxine?????????????????????????????????

What Maxine? Who's Maxine??????????????????

Casette, see this threads for more info:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2533956

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2125328

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=1827404

Just hack the maxine cr2 so that it points to the new object you want (V2,V2LO, Steph I LO, or Valerie LO), and resafe under a new name.

Stahlratte

I've only been around 3D CGI since last year, but I use V2 a lot, now.   She is more normal looking then v3 and has a better look.  It's hard to put into words, but V2 DOES have camera appeal.  There is still plenty of things around for her free, AND she does have WW support from Philc, so she can wear any cool outfit I can think to stick her in.

She may be "obsolete", but she is STILL useable, and in comparison to some more modern figures, her flaws are pretty minor.  At least she can bend her arms, look natural and NOT look like she dislocated them! :lol:  Poor Miki. LOL

Great!!! I have SP Max  :)

But... uh-oh... I can't find Maxine in The Netherworks freebs forum... damn... :(

I thought for sure you'd all banish me from this forum!  While everyone is looking forward to V4, I've found Voluptous Vicki and all her clothes...     pluse all the Posette textures from Happy World Land.

All the old Varish hair still looks great!  As do Anton's Pop Stars, and Changing Fantasy Suits.

I'm ready to install another Poser just for all this old stuff. 

I too remember when people were trying to outdo each other making textures and discovering new inventions like the MillNull to avoid cross talk. All for free.That was way before Victoria 1. And when V1 came out everyone hated her!   She was so ugly... Same with V2, And now she is the most lovely of them all.

Glad to see there is still interest for V2 - You all have great taste, LOL!

"...And now she is the most lovely of them all."

Not So!!  THAT accolade still belongs to Posette, The One And Only Queen of then all.
David P. Hoadley

PS: for proof, just browse through my gallery.

is it just me, or did more people make original morphs for v2?  it seems as if back in v2's day, "character" (free or commercial) meant custom morph, not a few dials spun.  i have an abundance of v2 free morphs, and not so many for v3.  is v3 harder to morph?  since i've never mastered any modeling program or magnets, it's all equally frustrating and time consuming to me.  but it does seem like with every new daz figure, the number of people actually changing the figure gets smaller.  are the complexities of the new figures discouraging experimentation?

I think it's also a question of Daz being more alert on copyright breaches. Back in the day where it was only the Poser characters, it was easy to share because you could share the CR2's. No one said anything about that.

Then came V1 and people still shared CR2's to a degree. But with V2, that avenue was closed, as it was essentially the CR2 that made her different from V1 - they're the same obj, more or less. V2 just has more morphs.

And V3 came out with the V3 Blank, but at that time, people had forgotten that it could be legal to share CR2's given the proper precautions.

Add the commercial element to that as well. Since people found out that they COULD make money on their creations, why shouldn't they? It enabled some people to start doing Poser stuff full time after all. Do not delude yourself: Proper modeling takes TIME. and time IS money.

So I share, and I sell. I share a lot more than I sell but I sell, and I do it because it enables me to have a hobby that pays for itself, something rather rare.

I think a LOT of the money stays in the Poser community, really. I use my money I've made on Poser models to buy other Poser models, and I don't think I'm the only one. Before I started selling, I had no way I could buy online AT ALL, as I didn't have a credit card. But this "commercialism" has, among other things, enabled me to buy Poser 6 and a lot of other cool programs.

Oh and V2 IS a nice model. I recently took her out of the mothbag as well, since I couldn't get my fancy V3 genitals to work. But I had an old version of V2 with built in genitals, so...

Quote - is it just me, or did more people make original morphs for v2?  it seems as if back in v2's day, "character" (free or commercial) meant custom morph, not a few dials spun.

Yeah...

I'm in the crowd that prefers V3 and especially Aiko 3...

But I agree on the above. Dial spins does not make a valid product. Anyone who sells something that is just dial spins should be ashamed of themselves.

A character is a custom morph. Free or not, at least be original.

V3 and A3 are actually -easier- to custom morph than V1 or V2 or Possette - not because of any polygon count or location issue, but because the tools used to make morphs have gotten better. I have Carrara 1 and 5 and believe me, 5 makes it a lot easier to make a new morph...

And other tools are even easier. Some of them even free.

It is just that the community momentum has changed. Somewhere between 2000 and 2003 the Poser community changed. It got very commercial, and everybody wanted in. To get in at the ground floor, people good at spinning dials realized other people would pay them to spin the dials...

These days you can buy a dial spin, a preapplied texture, a pre-set pose, a preset scene, preset lighting, and even a camera angle, and then hit the render button. Take that, post it in the gallery here at renderosity, and get all your friends to say "wow, that's amazing, you have so much talent" when the only thing you ever did was hit the render button, you didn't even so much as position the camera...

So yeah, a character is not a dial spin... Not in my opinion.

oh, don't get me wrong.  i realize it takes time.  and i appreciate your freebies and very low cost real world goods.  it just has seemed strange to me that, for instance, the $2 hexagon  and poser optimized blacksmith3d haven't meant more than about 12 or so people it seems doing custom morphs for the unimesh crew, commercial ones included.  for that matter, the p4 horse is much better supported than the mill one, and there's no sign of that changing.  but that's a different story.

Attached Link: Porn Starlet's Photo Shoot

Does this mean that all my characters I made with Posette, using Facial MT's I borrowed from NEA, Eve 4, and other places, aren't REAL?  Each of these characters are based on photographs of real people, and each took me from between three weeks to a month to produce, all the time while checking and comparing the wireframe against my reference photos. 
Just because I did it in Poser, and not in Carrara, doesn't lessen the amount of Blood, Sweat, Toil & Tears that I poured into these figures.  The MT's might have been premade, but my APPLICATION of them was completely original.

Girl Leaning on a Fence: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1304280&member

I have to agree with David here. Dial spins CAN be new characters, it's a question of how much you put into it.

My usual Snape is a dial spin. Granted, he's a consolidated morphs from several face shaping packs available for M3, but nevertheless he's essentially a dial spin. And I'd say he looks nothing like the base M3, at least not imo.

Some people just can do amazing things with the dials, and in those cases I have no problems buying a "new" character. But just flattening the nose and blowing up the lips and boobs does NOT make a new character. It just makes an ugly V3. Or V2, or whatever.

Truly intricate dial work takes AT LEAST as much time as it does to use an external program - I have tried recreating my Snape in Blacksmith so I could share him more easily, and I've gotten pretty close. And probably in less time than what it took to make the Dial-Snape.

I think that one of the things that keeps people using the dials is that it's easy, it's easy to share, just run the finished cr2 through Injection PoseBuilder and you're all set.

And while Blacksmith also outputs a nice injection pose for you, Hexagon and other programs does NOT. And a lot of people, myself included, haven't the foggiest idea of how to make them by hand.

So the pure practical aspect is here, too, I think :o)

I use v1 and v2 and especialy VV victoria as you can do some bloody fantastic stuff with them, and to be honest even with the new g2 body morphs i find the g2 figures dont cut the musterd with certain poses.

Unlike g1 males look much beter apart from the between legs part.

One thing that strikes me a lot when I use V2 for something as I do from time to time:

If you buy a clothing set for V3 today, you expect as a matter of course that there will be at least some support for the main V3 morphs. So if you load up V3 and give her "Barbarian1 = 0.5", you can dial the same morph into the suit she's going to wear.

Not with V2. The clothing that was sold back then almost never had any morph support at all. Of couse, you could still use things like VV magnets, but generally, it seems less work went into V2 products.

Attached Link: My Art Gallery

Anyway, in case anyone didn't know, my Tabby character uses V2... so I have no plans to switch to V3. ;)

--John  

i like almost all of the figures i have to some extent. and i have a lot of stuff for v2.  i always feel i should use her more.  i have some characters i love for her - josi by handspan studios for instance- that i should give a chance more frequently.  with smoothing, i really don't find much quality difference between v2 and v3, other than the products i have for the latter and not the former. 

cool snape!  the only thing that seems a bit off to me is the eyes...

on the characters thing- i can see both sides.   i definitely know how much time can go into customization of a figure.  and without distribution, i wouldn't really care about what they're called.  but i don't feel as a product a dial spin is a "character".  that's a face pose, or a injection pose (with or without a texture).  often, i see products call themselves "morphs" when all they are is actually settings using someone else's morphs.   personally, i'd like that to be more clear.   though, i'lll admit, the only ones that actually annoy me about this is the ones that are basically cat eyes, big lips, and huge breasts as trekkiegrrl mentioned.

new morphs extend the use of a character.  someone else's dial settings have proven pretty much completely useless to me.  and i like to know what i'm buying.  for instance, if that snape were being sold as a face pose alone, i'd never buy it, because i have no snape renders planned (i don't like harry potter at all, and yes i know that's sacrilige.  does it count if i loved rickman in "something the lord made"?).  but if it included special realistic alan rickman eye morphs, i'd be very interested, because i would definitely use them in lots of images.  they'd have to be ones i didn't believe i could get by dialling, but there's a whole range of eyeshaping noone's touched.

for instance, bagginsbill is a master of the material room.  but he doesn't claim to distribute a render engine, or even textures.  does that make his efforts less?  of course not.  it just makes him clear about what he's handing out. 

the shift to injection pose as a barrier makes a lot of sense.

Incidentally, one thing I use is a V2/V3 hybrid - V2 head on V3 body. That's one way to allow V2 characters to wear V3 clothing.

suggestion to all: click (and zoom if your browser automatically scales to fit) to see the full sized image.  it's a lovely image, and the size reduction and re-compression by the forum really took away some of its finer points.

Yeah, mine looks pretty funky and jagged.