One of the more important reasons Posette became so popular with cg hobbyists in the Poser 3 and Poser 4 eras was the wide and easy availability of freeware variant characters. That was a different time, when goodwill prevailed in internet culture. Artists were eager to freely share their modifications of Poser 4 characters with others, and the companies which then owned the program (first Metacreations and later Curious Labs) understood that all this free hobbyist trading was quite good for their business by stimulating and amplifying consumer interest in their software. Twenty five years later, most of the hobbyist characters made in the Poser 4 era are nearly forgotten, which seems sad, as many of them were quite good, at least for their own time and tech level. Certainly, there were in those days many low effort and low quality offerings, which probably are best forgotten. Here I?ll focus instead on some of the more notable free P4NW characters of bygone days-- some notable in aesthetics or novelty, others in technical innovation or craftsmanship for their time. Apart from posing the models and applying good studio lighting, I won?t change the models presented here in any way from their original form and presentation. Or if I occasionally do make an alteration, I?ll say precisely what I changed and why-- often freebies were released in those days missing critical parts or with other serious flaws, which made them simply unusable unless a knowledgeable end-user did some Poser-Fu. Either way, given the historical purpose of this discussion, an accurate depiction of the figures as they originally appeared at their time of release will be my main concern. But readers should easily see that with only a little polish of modern props and techniques, many of these characters could easily be updated and adapted for modern artistic purposes. Please don?t ask where to find these characters today-- the answer will in all cases be: I don?t know :bad-words: . Most of the small websites once hosting these characters are gone, and the large hobbyist sites which still remain purged most of their Poser 4 content long ago. As hardly anyone still uses P4NW these days, this discussion is mostly intended for historical interest of virtual doll collectors rather than practical artistic value. If any of the once-free models here are still available at all, then using the Internet Archive?s Wayback Machine to study websites of the past will almost certainly be the only way to obtain them. Broadly speaking, in Poser 4 days I probably obtained most of these models from Renderosity, Renderotica, the 3D Comic Collective, or ShareCG. At least some old models are still available from the old 3d-cc using the Wayback Machine, though most were apparently never archived, and thus are lost forever. Likewise with ShareCG. The others are now mostly flea markets for hawking $$ wares, so I doubt any figures I once upon a time got from either 'R' are still available. As a further lesson to our wider community, most of these figures that included any documentation at all specify no redistribution allowed (otherwise I?d put them up in PF?s archive). I understand and appreciate the important reasons for adding such a clause to a free model-- one wouldn?t want greedy $$ corporations shamelessly plundering one?s freebie. On the other hand, however, all these years later when no one cares much anymore about Poser 4 era models except those of us who truly :heartbeat: Posette and Dork, the unfortunate and ultimate result is that those who might still be interested in these once widely-available models have no means whatever to obtain them, or use them for their intended hobbyist/non-commercial/personal entertainment purposes. It?s a sad state of affairs, but as the old song says ?We didn?t start the fire, it?s been always burning since the world was turning.? :dash: