After some time of using Sasha you will notice that you prefer some basic settings, maybe you rearrange some dials to your own liking or maybe you use another texture system (EZSkin etc.).
Now instead of setting all this over and over for each new figure, you should save your own personalized copy of S-16 to the Figure Library.
This is also a good idea in light of a backup: if something goes wrong with your "Working Copy", you still can fall back to the original figure.
If you develop your characters yourself, it might be another good idea to save a couple of such "Working Copies", each with a preferred basic shape or age.
Some general thoughts first:
Females come in all sorts of flavours: lean, tall, short, stout, sporty, skinny, etc.. I suppose that you've already created enough female characters to know your own archetypes which you use most of the time. Wouldn't it be a good idea if you had an "average" figure available of each archetype, from which you can develop an individual character, instead of reinventing the wheel over and over?
So here's how to proceed:
In the SASHA-16 folder in your Poser "Figures" Library there's a folder called "SASHA-16 Original Backup". Move your original S-16 figure to that folder, or better still, use the "Folder" icon to open the folder in Windows Explorer and create a COPY of S-16 in that "Backup" folder, keeping the copy in the main SASHA-16 folder for everyday use. Double safety...
(besides that, the original S-16 figure file is "read-only" anyway, for your own safety)
Now either create a couple of your favourite archetypes and save them to the SASHA-16 folder, or add to your collection of archetypes by saving anything you create in the future and consider worth conserving.
Over time you can thus create a variety of different character archetypes or different basic figure settings, ready for you to continue work on a character from a pole position.
"I know what you're thinking. And you're right."
Of course it would be a little disk space friendly if you saved not the whole figure as a preset, but save it to the "Pose" Library as a character injection instead.
When saving just a Pose file, you'd have to reload, refit, fine tune each item of clothing again and again. And your custom morphs must be extracted and made into a morph injection, to be applied over and over again too.
Disk space is cheap today, so why not avoid all the hassle and just save the full figure?
First and foremost:
Any character injection made for the original V4 will work in SASHA too, without any problems. However, before you inject any BODY shapes you should first remove the SASHA Teen shape (if applied), using the "REMove" files in the "Pose" Library. This is to prevent you from getting funny results.
Any Face injections/morphs can be injected anytime, regardless of body shape.
If there's no separate "head" injection file provided, but you only want that face without the body, here's a neat little trick:
SASHA can take any 3rd party morph injections because she retains the original "Community" channels.
BUT:
You CAN NOT use any of the "fix" morphs out there, like "Perfect V4" or similar morphs made to "fix" the joint bending of the original V4.
Remember that SASHA uses a different rigging system and all her joints do bend the mesh in a completely different way! (And to be honest, I don't think you will ever miss any of these fixes when working with SASHA)
SASHA has retained the UV layout and the texture groups from V4, so you can use all textures made for V4 without any restrictions.
As a bonus, with the integrated KarinaVagina MkV you won't need to texture the KV separately because it shares the same texture group (hip) and UV layout as the body. So it's all textured "in one go".
See 10. The SASHA Textures" and "8. The KarinaVagina MkV" sections for more details. (links will open in a new tab/window)
The hardest part is the very beginning. Every artist knows this terrible moment when sitting in front of a blank piece of paper or canvas, or a lump of plaster or marble, or whatever his medium is.
You are sitting in front of a screen instead, staring at a featureless 3D mesh with a void in your head.
So better get organized and figure out what you want to achieve. If you already have a couple of photos of your prospected character, then study them to get a "feeling" for that person. If you only have a vague idea, search the internet for pictures that come close to what you fancy.
Once you have this done, the next step is always to find a texture which resembles the one of your specimen best, or at least as close as possible.
For further fine-tuning of the texture, and even more texturing tricks, refer to the separate tutorial (link opens in new tab/window)
After this look for a hair that most closely matches the hair style of your specimen. This can be very hard indeed because so many 3D hairs are fantasy hair styles you won't see anywhere in normal life, except in Hollywood.
With some experience with Poser's Morph Brush and a little Kit-Bashing, you can always fine-tune that hair later. For the moment we only need the "closest-to" look because a bald headed character is a big hindrance when trying to match a face
Let's have a short resumée:
So all in all, we're ready to set to work.
Before we continue, let's reiterate the iron rules of character creation once again:
Never change shapes or scales in single body parts because it appears so convenient. Maybe it is for the moment, but I guarantee that you'll forget to scale some of these body parts in case you migrate the figure (e.g. in case of a SASHA update).
So use the BODY and the Head actors to sculpt and scale your character.
The organized SASHA subgroups will help you to find the morphs you look for much more easily than it was in V4.
The problem:
Over the more than ten years that V4 is in service now, a lot of character and other morphs were created for her. By design, older Poser versions couldn't create new morph target "on the fly", but you had to pick an already existing morph channel into which you had to inject your morph data.
That's what the Community Channels were intended for.
This sometimes becomes very frustrating because there is no "general rule" of which channels should be used for what kind of morphs, with the result of several morphs overwriting each other because they accidentally use the same channel: You win some, you lose some...
To give you a kind of safe haven for your own personal morphs and to leave behind the jostling and bickering in the standard community channels, I created SASHA's own "community" channels.
They can be found in the "SHAPE/INJection Channels/SASHA Channels" group. The naming range goes from "SBC 001" to "SBC 020" in the body, and "SHC 001" to "SHC 020" in the head.
However, as a look into the future, all the "Community" channels might become obsolete anyway.
In my current Poser version PP2014, build 10.0.3.26510 (this should equal SR3), I can create any morph file, inject it into the figure by a new name, and a new morph target is created! No more need to use the dreaded ".pmd" files any longer.
Just write your morph injection with the deltas, inject, and a brand new morph dial is created.
Prospect:
If this isn't just a temporary glitch (currently this only works in body parts, but NOT with "valueParm" dials in the BODY itself), a future version of SASHA could do away with all the community channels for good, making the figure even more light-weight.
Ah, dreaming... :D
Over the time I accumulated a lot of "special" morphs. These were originally only created to achieve a specific shape on a specific girl and may be of limited use for your own work.
However I can't take them out because it would block my own workflow (when transferring a character to the next version of SASHA-16).
Although they initially were made only for a specific purpose, you might find them useful too, despite of the sometimes odd names.
Just try them out: If they work for you, great. Otherwise just ignore them.
(you can easily spot them by the naming: any morph that has a female's name in it (except "Sasha"!) is one of these "special" morphs. Just try/apply or discard...
Now you've created your own custom character, with tweaked morphs, tweaked shaders and possibly some accessories.
You use it for your renders and then discard everything. Next time you start from scratch again...
But this is a total waste of time and work involved!
Mass storage is cheap nowadays: Just think about the price of a 2TB harddisk, and how much Poser files you can store on it. So why voluntarily jump through hoops, only to save a few megabytes??
*I* (like in "me, myself and I") always do it like this:
For each character (female/male - doesn't matter) which I create, I create special folders named after that character.
The original ".pz3" scene file where I create my character, I save it into a folder named after that character - BUT on a different physical drive than any of my runtimes!
This is a kind of backup, in case a drive fails.
When I think my character is worth finishing, I create another folder in my runtime/"Figures" library.
I name it after the character and save the finished, body height adjusted and locked figure to this folder.
From now on, if I want to play with one of my characters, I just need to go to my "Figures" Library, double-click the character and it loads with all bells and whistles.
The disk space useage of 62 to circa 100 MB per nude figure (with hair!) is negligible, compared to the time saved.
So consider this. It can also be useful if you want to use a character again, even after several years:
It's always there, waiting for you in your runtime for immediate recommission.