1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

My sincerest sympathy to your backbone.

I have had girlfriends with all sorts of body types, from thin to overweight, from absolutely flat chested to really busty, and while I do prefer the curvier body shapes, not all women are like that, nor do they need to be to be attractive to me.

One problem with the really busty figures I feel in creating scenes in DAZ studio is the challenge to make any combat poses look realistic. Big boobs tend to make many melee weapon poses look like the poor gal is going to either cut pieces of her body herself with the sword swings, or she is surely going to fall over boobs-first, should she dare to move at all.

I have some body morphs, allowing me to adjust the size of the breasts, as they can help me use a character that won't do with the shapes the character is sold with.

I am not a PA, only a hobbyist artist. For me to get the "Wow! I really need this character for my collection at this instant!" reaction, or even to immediately picture a scene where I could use that character, the character should follow the guidelines posted by Penguinisto to an extent. There needs to be a distinct personality displayed in the character promos, preferably with a body type that is absolutely not a "they come 12 in a dozen" type. Some make-up matching the personality helps a lot too.

Oh, and to all the PA's out there, do list the items used in the promos, pretty please. Some of the promos alone would have made me buy your character if only I knew the hairstyle used, and the outfit used, so that I could re-create that striking look.

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

Sometimes I'm afraid of making a character's shoulders too narrow since I play with that slider and I usually dial back "breast implants" and dial up natural 

One of my favorite characters is Amira since she's big yet still pretty. When I dialed up fitness I actually had to dial up her waist too

Most of the characters I use run a bit thin but it's not the only way to be attractive and even then not all characters have to be hot 

For tomboyish girls I'd add more makeup options such as contouring in a way to achieve a more masculine face and yeah a lot of default looks are madeup too 

There's a whole different set of fashion rules for different bodytypes too 

And I hear you on the rigid part some guys when you use an age down still look way too defined for their new age even if you mess with so many face morphs 

While I don't make models (yet? I know there are good Udemy courses on it) from what I can see it's texturing. Mari's not only expensive but you have to think about making normal maps, bump maps, and all that too and get them to wrap around the model it's made for too 

Tho I'll probably do environments instead of people since there's so many great potential environments. There's so much good new sustainable and hi tech architecture too. So at least one completely green city where poverty's been eradicated and very walkable and cool trainstations too tho maybe I can make them seperate? Anyway it would be set during a good future where climate change is solved and not a worry anymore and some of the buildings will be wavy with cool lights and windows and palms and other trees along the streets and plants seen on some buildings 

Yeah, none of the bridge plugins seem to transfer JCM.

Well, the Blender and Maya versions do.  Was hoping either 3dsMax or C4d would...

I bought a dynamic shirt for Michael4  and when I click it onto the morph it pop on him but in a T positions, and  if I move him the shirt is still hanging in mid air and the morph is left shirtless whereever I've moved him to. How do you make the cloths get "put on"  and move with the characters wearing them. I don't have that problem with all the other cloths.

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

yeah here a exemple this is a "famous" ex porn japanese now cosplayer Shibuya Kaho

she is natural large breasts and definitly she is not 300+bls, some peoples have that idea which womans must be "small breasts" all over the world which is the "natural" and only if you get fat which they "grow" but it's not really like that, this what make humans a so special race, because different propertions and spects of the body can happen and is really, really hard to 2 peoples looks like "twins" or equals even when we talk about "races, like 2 caucasian or 2 african never gonna look's like the same, aside from the color, in the same way you can have "ugly or no so attractive womans" being born you have really gorgogoes/awesome or "saiko-desu body" and face womans, the same goes for males, what is matter more is the "genetic" as a big factor, good genes gonna create good look peoples even if they are a little fat(not super ungly fat) the same goes for breast sizes if you family genetic is about "large breast womans" then you aways gonna see "large breast womans" on that family and only few rare cases this not gonna happens.

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

https://www.sharecg.com/v/80049/browse/5/3D-Model/Gerry-Anderson-UFO-TV-Series

https://www.sharecg.com/v/66550/related/11/Poser/Space-1999-Hawk-Fighter

https://sharecg.com/v/66558/gallery/11/Poser/Space-1999-Landingspad

https://www.sharecg.com/v/35523/related/5/3D-Model/Stingray

https://www.sharecg.com/v/87189/related/5/3D-Model/FAB1

https://sharecg.com/v/36621/related/5/3D-Model/Thunderbird-4

https://sharecg.com/v/94263/related/21/DAZ-Studio/Thunderbird-3-for-DAZ-Studio

https://sharecg.com/v/36586/related/5/3D-Model/Thunderbird-2

https://sharecg.com/v/94261/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Thunderbird-2-for-DAZ-Studio

https://sharecg.com/v/94255/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/Thunderbird-1-for-DAZ-Studio

https://sharecg.com/v/14005/gallery/11/Poser/Thunderbird-1

https://sharecg.com/v/36284/related/5/3D-Model/Thunderbirds-Elevator-Cars

https://sharecg.com/v/38675/related/5/3D-Model/Fireflash

https://sharecg.com/v/35766/related/5/3D-Model/Zero-X

https://sharecg.com/v/35946/related/5/3D-Model/Zero-X-Assembly-Control

https://sharecg.com/v/36589/related/5/3D-Model/Mortar-Truck

https://sharecg.com/v/40201/related/5/3D-Model/Lunar-Carrier

https://sharecg.com/v/36635/related/5/3D-Model/IR-Deflector-Truck

https://www.sharecg.com/v/52252/view/5/3D-Model/SHADO-acoustic-gun

https://sharecg.com/v/43520/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Col.-Paul-Foster-M4-Head-MORPH

https://sharecg.com/v/43411/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Col-Virginia-Lake-V4-Head-MORPH

https://sharecg.com/v/43409/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Ayshea-Johnson-Head-MORPH

https://sharecg.com/v/43195/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Nina-Barry

https://sharecg.com/v/43194/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Joan-Harrington

https://sharecg.com/v/42909/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/SHADO-Operative-Lt-Gay-Ellis-HeadMorph-V4

https://www.sharecg.com/v/53143/browse/11/Poser/SteveKitts-SHADO-Hawk-from-U.F.O.-show

https://sharecg.com/v/48408/gallery/11/Poser/SteveKitts-SHADO-Falcon-from-U.F.O.-show

https://sharecg.com/v/42781/favorite/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Uniforms-for-V4

https://www.sharecg.com/v/44967/related/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Party-Outfits-for-V4

https://www.sharecg.com/v/43105/related/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Uniforms-V4-Addon

https://www.sharecg.com/v/41331/gallery/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Moonbase-from-UFO-TV-movie

https://www.sharecg.com/v/42865/gallery/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Uniforms-Updater-not-standalone-

https://sharecg.com/v/50270/gallery/11/Poser/V4-Gaby-Drake-Lt.Ellis-Morph-by-GSayers2005

https://sharecg.com/v/40461/gallery/11/Poser/SHADO-Moonbase-pure

https://sharecg.com/v/40912/gallery/11/Poser/V4++-Lt.-Ellis-dialed

https://sharecg.com/v/30715/gallery/11/Poser/S.H.A.D.O.-Moonbase-uniform-materials-Update

https://www.sharecg.com/v/53444/browse/5/3D-Model/MOLLY-Rocket-launcher-from-UFO

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

ehh, what the heck, I'll post it here also since it seems to fit & I liked how this turned out.

Sukai 8... dial spin with 65% Sukai, 35% Kayo to get her more towards the realistic side/less stylized, a couple more dials for my tastes.

Fit the Xuanwu (Black Turtle) armor onto her. It works really well, I think. The autofit parts mostly go without issue (minor chest issues), and some parts are actually made to be parented (shoulders and collars). Those parented parts were done really intelligently, IMO. That's why the shoulder and collar pieces look really nice in this male-to-female transfer.

I just cannot keep up

everything new from DAZ disappoints me when I realize it's all too much for my machines

and I bought and upgraded one too but not enough as don't have the average DAZ user budget 

That's one of the things that helps keep me firmly planted in Carrara. My first Carrara machine was a (then new) Core2Duo machine and I was thrilled with how quickly I could get Carrara to render compared to anything else.

I did buy SickleYield's plugins so I can turn Genesis 2 and 3 clothing into Genesis compatible stuff, which works fairly well. But with the clones from Daz for all of the previous generations, only going back as far as Generation 3, those older clothing sets seem to really work well auto-fitted to Genesis. 

The thing that made it hard for me to go from V4/M4 to Genesis 1 was that I liked the Genesis 2 shapes so much more. But when using Genesis 2, I can no longer use my (by now fairly large) Genesis 1 clothing without a lot of work around.

So following your advice to grab GenX2 has made all the difference in the world for me. I am amazed at how well the Genesis 2 and 3 shape morphs transfer over to Genesis 1 - and Genesis 1 is the one that is fully supported in Carrara, so everything just works!

So now I often find myself leaving the store filter on "Newest First" and start from the last page and work forward - not always, but quite often. The store has some real gems from those previous years! But then again, your collection is a bazillion times larger than mine, so maybe you already got all the good stuff?

1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

 

6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!

I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? )

Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

Dforce (and other) Men's clothes materialise fully formed and have no seams that show where they are stitched together, no belt hoops, no zips, no pockets, and are paper thin. Not in the mesh (preferred) or on the textures. And they should never look to have realistic collars on shirts or lapels on jackets, which, as Maidecker says, rarely have an open morph. But women have every option to open and take off their clothes down to their 100 bikini's.

Gallery link

Another M4 -> G8 celebrity transfer, this time Jepe's Jonah, the Worthiest of Hems.

I'm actually really happy with this one. Although I do mourn the loss of his dimples, they didn't make the transition.

Jonah comes with IRAY settings, so no material conversion was necessary. I did tweak the settings a little though and I still think he's probably a little too red.

in your case you may want to look at geografts instead, the autofit could work if you want it to fit over the top of part of the limb, and making one is pretty much a case of creating it in the correct place and then using the transfer utility with the figure as source and the wound prop as target (this will create a wound figure that fits to G8, but doesn't hide any of the G8 mesh)

but again I would suggest looking for tutorials on making geografts, as the geograft will let you replace part of the limb geometry with your wound graft.

Well, that's a start! Thanks :)

Why won't D-force hair ever work properly for me? I am always able to load them up just fine and use morph styles but whenever I try to change the Iray materials colours I keep getting a message that pops up saying; 'an error occured while reading the file, see the log file for more details' and nothing happens. I always get it no matter what D-force hair I use. Other hair I use that is not D-force works just fine.

Any ideas on why this is happening? thx. I am using Daz 4.12 by the way.

To answer op. I agree with Rawart

The hardest part is that everyones idea of what constitutes "a quality character" is different

In terms of aestetic considerations It is all subjective what is appealing is going to depend on the person

more "realistic" porportions (and this doesn't really mean realistic just closer to average proportions) isnt intrinsically better quality just an aestetic preference. (one I personally have for the record)

and thats not even going into intentionally stylized characters who might have a completely different sense of aestetic conventions. 

That said there are a couple of technical elements that I do think have some degree of objective quality

mcms and jcms - when your character bends do weird bumps or creases form? when you bend the arms and legs is there a binch of self intersection? when you dial in the default expressions do they immediately become an unholy nightmare? 

on the extreme good end od the spectrum there is smay's Boris which has about 50 million HD jcms and is just an absolute technical marvel. Look at this

I mean look at it. when you form a fist the details on the knuckles change. One of the few things I bought immediately on release despite not knowing if I would ever have any use for it - I bought it purely out of apreciation for technical artistry.

not everything needs to be to this level, but there shouldnt be creases or large abount of self-intersection when the figure is posed within the limits.

in a similar vein - I personally believe that the main daz morphs should also work without distortion. Make the fleshy chestal protrusions as big or small as you desire when the "breasts gone" morph gets dialed in the breasts should probably gone or at minimum not turn into a horribly distorted mess.

in terms of textures/materials they should be optimized to not needlessly waste memory. I like 4k testures I can even see some instances where 8k testures would be good. Extra maps which give the user options are good. But, for the love of god, if you, for example, have textures with and without eyebrows but your material settings only apply the eyebrowless texture to the face maat zone and leave the otherwise identical textures with brows on the ears doing absolutely nothing but needlessly taking up memory I do hate you just a little bit. 

I think there was some makeup product I bought that used layered images, but applied the lips only to the lips and the face only to the face meaning you ended up with 3 seperate sets of facial maps Since it also used the bump and spec this meant using it as is made your figure use an extra 6 4k maps completely unnecesarily 

of course all of this is small under the hood details that is almost impossible to show as a selling point and a bunch of folks will never notice anyway, So I'm not sure how much its in a vendors interest to put the extra  time into

I think you can delete them. If it doesn't work, restore the product. But there are a lot of morphs that can be triggered in a a figure, and every new product loaded creates more potential conflcts. 

I have a problem with a set of teeth thats gets triggered for a monster. I simply deleted the teeth morph, now I can still use the monster although he doesn't have those teeth. A ticket to DAZ store remains unresolved, so sometimes you have to try it and see what happens.