I saw a post by someone who commented that it is very difficult to create faces that look very different using CC's tools.  This is very true if you only have the base sliders and you don't have skin gen.  Even with skin gen, I frequently need to go into GIMP or a similar program to create dark skin that looks real.  

That said, the first thing you need to make radically different characters are the extended slider set (Ultimate Morphs I think) and headshot. If you are patient and experiment a lot, you can produce very different results. I realized long ago this was the business model and I simply forked over the cash. Because I am very into this, it was worth it to me. 

Taking some time to just do normal artschool things like accquainting yourself with Grey's Anatomy is also essential.  It's one thing to think "His nose needs to be longer."  It's another thing to be able to think about how different facial structures must change when you make a nose longer.

Sadly, if you don't have these, the best you can really do is make different combinations of CC's base heads and then morph from there as much as you can. You can also use the mesh editor to push pull and smooth features, but that is very difficult to do in CC's engine successfully. However, in many of my earlier models, that I then used as morphs to combine with more recent projects, I did exactly that.  If you have Blender and Daz, I believe you could, in principle, sculpt a head in Blender, convert it in DAZ and import your morphed character into CC. I've never tried.

You can tell me if these look real (some look more real than others as my skills have grown) and or very different.  The thing about CC, is that learning to get everything you can out of it takes work and time. It will always be faster than starting from a sphere in Blender in producing something that at least looks human. However, I chose each of the following images because they showcase a skill set that needed to be developed to make the characters work. 

If anyone finds these potentially useful and wants to chat about how I did any of these, please ask.  I don't want to sound like some self appointed expert, but I did want to show some of the things I've found possible and I believe I've figured a few things out.

In the end, I have skin gen, ultimate morphs, headshot, hair and beard builder, and the IRAY extension to render these.  I also use Blender to make hair and have imported other hair models from other places and meticulously fit them to my avatars.  These are all the sorts of things that just take time and effort in CC.  

If I were going to complain, the biggest things I want from CC4 are:

1. Better ways to make African, Latin and/or Asian skin. 

2.  More base skin types that dont have all sorts of blemishes built in, but rather the ability to add them as wanted without spending hours trying to clean things up.

3. More control over sculpting the cheek regions and the mouth.

4.  An overall, higher poly count avatar for closeups.  There are simply not enough polys in the model to make a realistic chin cleft.

5. Better cloth physics so I can just render my scene in CC4 and not have to import to Iclone and then have it balk if I have too many polys. I just want skirts to drape properly without having to spend an hour or two transferring weights and playing with lateral partitioning.  I get that there is a thrust towards animation in Iclone, but sometimes, I just want a realistic still photo.

If I were going to ask for things from the content store I would want:

1. First and foremost, better, higher poly, hair models.  

2. Did I mention better, hgher quality hair models?

3.  NO really guys... HAIR.