"And of course, a lot of these images have postwork (as all professional still images should.) It not that hard to cover up flaws in postwork." You're right, but most of these guys do animations. Have you ever seen Stahlberg's figures in action? Or the figures from FinalFantasy? You can't have screwed up joints when working with animation, or you're finished. It would take far too long to fix those problem over the course of say 50,000 frames. Stills, obviously, allow you much more freedom. Perhaps the images in and of themselves don't impress you very much, but the bending of the models at their joints is what really counts, and what we're talking about. The rest is just a matter of the "artists eye", texturing, and a matter of opinion. ;-) "I have yet to see a clearly superior high-end realistic model that looks good in full anatomy shots and many different poses." I'd recommend investigating the works of Steven Stahlberg, and visiting CgTalk once in a while. Many of the "stills" you see on those galleries are actually stills from an animation, or a model that's about to be animated for movies or games. Steven's models have appeared in countless animations, and his models are all fully rigged specifically for that. Also do some research into Blur Studios and check out some of their mind-blowing animations, or the works of Liam Kemp. Liam has done some award-winning animations featuring realistic human models. There's also amazonsoul.com, which is created in part by one of the same guys who worked on the FinalFantasy movie. The images and models there are HIGHLY realistic, and also animated. Be warned, the content is of an adult nature, and most of it is hidden behind a member's only area, but you do get to see some impressive stills, and small clips of animation.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.