This is nice work but she looks a little "fatty' for lack of a better term.

It's absolutely beautiful... Lovely character and great posing !!!

Ooo... now this I like! If you're after a caucasian skin-tone this is great - the balance of highlight, mid-tone and shadow looks good to me, and the skin seems to use most of the dynamic range. I think I see what bebopdlx means by "fatty" - specifically on the thighs? But to me that sort of adds to the 'realism'... One easy way to give a bit more 'texture' to the skin is to plug a random noise node (I mainly use Poser) into the bump channel - SnarlyGribbly's EZSkin does the same (but that's Poser only too) so it's not just me who thinks it's a good idea! If you adjust the bump strength and the noise scaling you can get a very subtle effect at your chosen render size - but it takes a lot of trial and error. In DAZ Studio a tileable noise image map plugged into the bump channel is possibly the easiest way to do this.

Another very important question if you're after 'realistic' images - what are you using to render the images? As well as the built in render (I think DAZ Studio still uses 3Delight?) there are a couple of other options. Casual has done some scripts to allow you to export a DAZ scene for rendering in Blender's Cycles renderer (check on the DAZ Freepozitory forum - it's not hard hard to find Casual there!). There's also the Reality plugin that'll export a DAZ scene for rendering in Luxrender. I haven't tried Casual's method, but I've used the Reality > Luxrender route for some tests and got what I considered fantasically realistic results with V3 and a couple of freebie V3 textures.

Note: Casuals script is free, and so is Blender. Luxrender is also free, but Reality for DAZ Studio is not.

thank you very much for your help! I do use Daz Reality set up. I would like to try blender and oxtane renderer. But i feel i need to see a series of video tutorials before I'm comfortable spending the money. If you know of any Daz to Octane/Blender videos - please link them. I am only just now starting to look in to settings for bump maps. I've spent so much time creating specular maps that I have neglected the bumps. After my next render I will start with eye materials, and the renders will be closer to the body. So I will pay much more attention to bump settings and maps. Yes, regarding Ms. Fatty, I am a fan of curves! HAHAAH Again, thank you for all of your input.

With Reality have you tried playing around with the tone-mapping options? There's quite a lot of options to choose from there (I don't remember any details as I haven't used it for several weeks, but one of the tabs is dedicated to it - although it's not labelled "Tone Mapping") and it can really change the way the render looks Don't forget that the Blender Cycles option (using Casual's 'mcjTeleBlender' script to export from DAZ) is free (afaik) - check Casuals thread on the DAZ forum - http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/2877/ ... there may be useful links there (of course there'd be a big learning curve...) Personally I tried Reality (from both Poser and DAZ Studio) and was impressed... but my preference is to use Poser 9 and the built-in Firefly renderer!