It never ceases to amaze me how many people spend countless hours searching for even more improved ways to render the human form, while the most basic thing to achive realism is commonly overlooked:

SHAPE.

As someone who did scale modelling for 35+ years, unrealistc "eyeballed" models really make me sick, especially when they are done by people who DO have the technical skills to make an excellent model, but couldn´t be bothered searching for some correct blueprints.

While it´s true that only nerds (like me. LOL) might spot a wrong shape in a "Spitfire" plane, wrong shapes in more common things will be spotted by a lot more people.

And then it´s about something as common as the human body, everyone of us is an expert who easily can spot if something is "wrong".

At least one should think so.

While of course everyone is build different, there are rules about human proportion which apply to the "average" human beeing, and can be used as a blueprint just like one uses a blueprint or photographs when you model other things.

So let´s load Andrew Loomis human proportions chart into Poser and lets see how our favorite girl measures up against it:

The size of the human skull doesn´t vary much among adults, so we have to scale the chart untill the head size matches that of Vicky 3.

Compared to Loomis 5'7" "Ideal" woman, V3 turns out to be an awe inspiring 6'3" Amazon. (Or is that "Mammazon" ?)  ;-)

Ouch. Not even Supermodels are that tall.

So lets scale her down to make her more, well, not "average", because the average US woman is even shorter than Loomis "ideal", but at least more "human":

Body : scale    88%
Head: scale   102%
Stretch Arms:  0,5
FootPetite:       -1
Hands: scale 105% 

A lot better, don´t you think ?

Playing around with V3´s standard bodymorps, we can get even closer to Loomis "ideal" shape:

For those interrested, the texture used is Jochen38´s free Elizabeth texture. Most likely the nicest FREE V3 texture I´ve ever seen.
Head morph is my own. The bodymorphs, apart from a single magnet used to compensate for the neck deformation caused by the head scaling, are standard V3.

Now lets turn to the second favorite realistic model out there: Miki.

Miki´s body was patterened after Czech model Anetta Keys, so we know she is 5'5" tall:

That´s actually bit too tall for an average Japanese woman which are more like 5'0" to 5'2" , so I scaled her down by shortening the thighs, shins and the abdomen along the y-axis.
She´s now 5'3".
I actually would modify her body even a bit more to emphasize that she´s Japanese, but even right out of the box she has pretty realistic proportions.

Next to her is my "Euro-Miki", a V3-Miki hybrid that shows MIKI´s original body at 5'5" height.

Conclusion:

Right out of the box, V3 is pretty useless when you want render a realistically proportioned female.
(And so are all the other DAZ meshes)

At the very least scale her head to 112%, make her arms a bit longer and scale up hands and feet to match the head.
(And modify your other figures in a similar fashion.)

MIKI has a lot of other problems, but at least her shape is pretty realistic (for an average European woman).

And OF COURSE you can go on and use V3 and the other DAZ folks just as they are, because there is that thing called artistic freedom, so you decide what you like.

All I´m saying that if you want to claim "realism" for your work, first make sure that the models themselves are actually realistic.

Stahlratte