Hi there,

Thanks in advance for reading, this is a bit of a lengthy post.

I'm currently stuck in limbo between total n00b and competent render artist.  I've studied extensive tutorials for DS, Poser, and even ZBrush for several months.  I already have pretty specific ideas about what kind of renders I want to make, but the vast pool of learning resources for these tools and techniques are often too general, outdated, or way too advanced to be of any help.  Any advice on what I'm trying to do would be immensely appreciated!! :)

The goal:

To create a very specific design for a single character that can be clothed, posed, and potentially animated in a small variety of environments.  For now, it's really all about getting the character up and running for posing/animation.

The work to date:

I started in DAZ 4.6 working from Victoria 4.2 as a base.  I purchased this themed character here on Renderosity, finding her look to be in the ballpark for the character I want to make.

I loaded up new morphs and mats and then dialed in some custom settings using the V4.2 Morphs++ and got the character to a pretty good place.  At certain angles, the resemblance to the character I'm aiming for was definitely apparent.  Other angles, not so much, but it was definitely a good, encouraging start.  

I had reached a point where I needed to be able to refine some features at a level that seemed unavailable with the DAZ toolset.  Most of all, I needed more control over morphing the nose and mouth.  Meanwhile, I had been reading interviews with several of my favorite artists, and most of them said they worked in Poser with DAZ base models.  I also found Ironman13's BOOM morphs for nose, lips, etc. which were built for Poser.  So I took the plunge and moved over to Poser.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I managed to port my custom V4.2 character into Poser. By this point I had also purchased some clothing and hair.  

After viewing/reading several tutorials I managed to get the clothing and hair onto the model, but so far I have found the fitting process to be extremely frustrating, as the conforming feature isn't really working since I've made a variety of custom tweaks to various parts of the body shape.

I've also spent quite a bit of time with the BOOM morphs for the finer control of the nose/mouth and have also hit a brick wall, only getting a little closer to the desired result while feeling like I've exhausted to capabilities of the morphs.

So I'm finally reaching out to the community, something I probably should've done much sooner! XD

Here's what I'm wondering:

• Are the steps I've taken so far for my character design a good workflow?  
• Should I have built the character from a zeroed V4.2 base instead of starting from the custom themed character?  
• Should I just bring the character (in it's current state in DAZ) into something like ZBrush to finalize the finer details?  I know exactly how it should look -- I suspect there's probably some magical combination of dials in Poser, but lordy it sure seems like a bit of a crapshoot sometimes.
• Is this what I should expect when using 3rd party content with such a customized character or are there steps I'm missing or doing incorrectly that would make this process less tedious/frustrating?
• Is there some glaring thing that I'm doing wrong, forgetting, etc?!

Thanks so much for reading!