I want to use one of the programs to make my story into a manga series. I need anime looking characters. From what I've seen, iclone can use face morphing to create custom faces using 2D images, so I looked up a tutorial and found that someone made a anime face using it. I also need to be able to make toon style low poly hair, or at least know that I have full hair design freedom to produce the illusion of toon hair. Proportions are a little bit of a different issue though. My issue comes in shaders, crazy outta control facial expressions, and full posing freedom, which from my point of view, it seems to be scattered across the board with both programs. So as it stands, I'm not sure which one wins this. iclone, or Poser? Which is better for this?

As far as toon hair goes, Poser Hair is pretty well there I would think.  CrazyTalk8 is better at making custom faces, in my opinion, but why not just create your manga character in DAZ3D?   You could export the character with facial expressions to fbx, import into 3DxChange then export into iClone. 
Just my two cents worth, I hate seeing a post go unanswered! :D


Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
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Well, I know I can do that, but its more a matter of whether or not I should. I was under the impression that even if you got the Avatar from DAZ3D, there would still be limitations, and you could never get unlimited or close to unlimited imagination with the design. If CrazyTalk can get good faces similar to anime styles, then maybe I should just ho that route, especially since iclone is cheaper.

I did use heads from DAZ avatars as a reference in CT8 a couple times as an experiment, adjusting the skin color and lighting on the face before using in CT8 will give you different results.  I also used "ImageOverlayUtility-0.7.7.7" which helped a lot,  I plan on giving it another try soon and will save before and after pics this time.  I think you'll need 3DxChange also if you want to export the heads you create in CT8.


Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
Acer Aspire V Nitro Laptop,  2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor with 6MB cache,  256GB solid state drive, 16GB Ram,  4 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics.

I would have thought Crazytalk Animator was more suited to Manga
maybe in conjunction with SmithMicro's Manga studio

I have a suggestion. Perhaps you might want to investigate Iclone with the Avatar toolkit 2. From what you're saying it sounds like you want to be able to get a lot more animated in expressing emotions. DAZ offers you some other options, but you're going to have to add something to get it to be really toony. If you think outside of the box a little, you might be able to design something like Avatar Toolkit Eyebrows where you get the regular expression, and then you get to animate the eybrows to a more insane degree Or you can create some replacement toony anime styled eyes or a head prop you can texture the same color as your character and in places where you want to do something zaney --you can insert a chibi prop with some a dummy bone based morph or something like that. You're going to have to do a little more prep work like texturing and modeling some of the things you can't find. You can use it It for other effects to if you create props like hairpieces where you can use puppeteer controls to do things like whip ponytails. Those are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head, but you see where I'm going? How you accomplish what you desire is really up to you and how resourceful you can be with the tools you have. It's not so much as which one is better for what project. You can even use those techniques with Character Creator Characters --my point is that you're going to have to stop looking in some cases for a solution you can buy and start thinking about what you can do to build what you want. Every tool has its limitations and strengths but if you are inventive enough you can either make up for them or create a whole new way of doing something that we all haven't thought of before.