My Poser work is still primarily done with Victoria 4 which is over 14 years old at this point. Some of the original Vicky 4 stuff actually looks bad by today’s standards, but over the years, new texture tech, rendering tech, and weight mapped rigging has made Vicky 4 stuff look a lot better.

So I was wondering. Could I go back and improve the old legacy models in Poser that no one uses? Could I give them new life again? Well the answer turns out mixed.

What I am doing is running scripts to update textures to be SSS and Superfly compatible, then adding more modern and detailed looking hair and see if that is enough to make them worth using again.

The above picture is the oldest you can realistically go back — about 20 years. The Poser 4 and 5 standard model, now often dubbed “Posette” has at least some fairly realistic shape, but it is low resolution. Notice the jaggy shoulders. I also had to use a freebie painted texture Andreia for P4 by 3Dream to get it this good. “Victoria” by Zygote (Now Daz3D) was available by then and Poser users primarily used that instead of Posette.

Poser 6 (by Curious Labs) decided to compete with the Victoria 3 and Michael 3, and introduced their own models Jessi and James. They came with really dumb “strand” hair that never looked or rendered right, and so people generally stuck to the Vicky and Mikes, but updating these figures shows that they were actually really good looking. In fact these might be the best looking Poser originals ever.

Poser 7 (now owned by e-frontier) new models were Simon and Sydney. Instead of the good looking models of Poser 6, these models actually looked like real people. A middle aged Caucasian male and an Asian female.

Smith Micro bought the company and soon released some awful looking figures for Poser 8 called Alison and Ryan, along with 3 ethnic variants each. By this time Daz had already released Victoria 4 and Michael 4, and that was what everyone was using instead of these two for obvious reasons. For Poser 9 (the one that introduced SSS skin texturing), they doubled down with Alison 2 and Ryan 2 that looked just as bad. In fact these are the improved models.

Someone at Smith Micro brought up that Alison and Ryan were very flexible figures that could rival the Daz figures if someone wanted to play with the morphs and create a pretty figure. So a modeler named Blackhearted did and created these morphs for Alison 2 and Ryan 2 called Anastasia and Tyler aka Girl Next Door (and friend).

While this was a marked improvement over the base figures, none of the clothing designed for the first two worked with the second two, hence the reason they are nearly naked in this pic.

Paul and Pauline were introduced in Poser 11 that was first released five years ago. They existed to demonstrate a number of concepts like facial “chips” to move facial features around to make expressions and they came with textures all ready for Superfly. Compared to Alison and Ryan they looked “normal” which is a good thing. Compared to the new Genesis models over at Daz3D, they looked “normal” which was a bad thing.

La Femme was released in early 2019 by RPublishing, a division of Bondware, and the male equivalent L’homme which started as a morph of La Femme came out in late 2019. The previous mentioned Blackhearted was one of the main artist on the project. Bondware bought Poser and added them both to Poser 11.3.

I’ve worked extensively with La Femme. The default face isn’t that interesting, but I can make it much prettier really easy. It is still not as pretty as the latest Genesis 8 figures, but it has technological advantages like weight mapping and facial chips, that Genesis 8 can’t match.