One of my big problems is populating scenes with background people (not the 2D cardboard cutouts that work in some situations, but not here).  I know that the regular M4 and V4 without the morphs are some help, but that's still a lot of vertices. I also still want to be able to pose them, so saving as objs won't work either.

I thought there was something in Carrara that helped with this, but I can't remember what it was.  Any help along these lines would be greatly appreciated.

You can work with Carrara's Surface Replicator and control distribution with a texture map for  creating a crowd out of 4 or 5 Daz characters. 

However, if you truely want individually posed characters for all of them, you'll be required to use individual characters. The saving grace is that you can enable LOD (Levels of Detail) to reduce the processor time during render and preview to help keep things manageable. 

Thanks Mark, and I found some info about the LOD capability of Carrara, but I can't find the LOD files anywhere on my computer.  According to the Daz site, they should be in the geometries folder with my V4 and M4 info, but they're nowhere to be found.

LOD character derivatives, mainly Victoria, were created by DAZ around v6/7. However, it looks like the newer figures do not have premade LOD .obj files and the resources for the old Victoria series are no longer available on the DAZ site.

You can make them yourself if you are inclined, saving each .obj file to a new file (Important!) by decimating the polygons progressivley for each version.

Also, the DAZ Studio4 is set up to do this already. 

So, the bottom line for LOD is that it doesn't appear to be simply click-and-play solution at this time. 

Mark

Hi Docmatter Predatron at Daz has some low poly figures, okay if y ou get them on sale, bit ugly but usable for what you want maybe.

http://www.daz3d.com/predatron?limit=60

I also have a low res m3 in my Carrara people folder, have no idea where he came from tho

I just redownloaded the V4 base file to check and in the geometries folder is a folder called blMilWom_v4b_LOD which contains lo-res versions. To make them usable (albeit without morphs)  make a copy of the v4.2 cr2 file and in a text editor replace both instances of :Runtime:Geometries:DAZPeople:blMilWom_v4b.obj with :Runtime:Geometries:DAZPeople:blMilWom_v4b_LOD:V4_LOD_1K.obj  and save the cr2 as, for example, V4.2_1K.cr2 and you will have a posable 1K V4 figure. Do the same for the other res versions and you will have lo-res versions available.

Same scenario with M4.

Thanks all!  I had to redownload the V4 and M4 base figures from DAZ to get the LOD files I was looking for.  For some reason, they didn't come the first time.  Must have been an update.

Here are a few solutions to fill out those scenes, Lo-res style

http://www.daz3d.com/lorez-casual-man-1
http://www.daz3d.com/loretta-lorez
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/m-o-m-crowd-generator/71815
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/soldierlwr-02/64891

Best of Luck!