Armoury bodies usually have tight joints that hold poses well, but these bodies just don't look as good as a CG body: body parts do not align properly across joint lines, some shapes (hips a.o.) are asymmetric left to right and the edges of the waist and chest joints are thick and square.
On top of that the breasts look like a cheap boob-job gone wrong and the 'skin' texture is a high-gloss.
Here is what I did to improve the looks of the Armoury body that I used for Claire.
Each of the pictures shows a new unmodified Armoury body on the left and the modified body on the right, clicking on a picture shows a larger view.
I started by sanding down any square-ish and misaligned edges around joints and correcting the asymmetrical shapes as best as possible, then I reshaped the contours of the hips, lower chest edge and the breasts.
During sanding I tried to avoid creating any thin weak spots, so I frequently checked the thickness of the remaining plastic by shining light of a bright desk lamp through the body.
The center section of the body is shaped like a kiwi-fruit, so by scraping with a curved #10 knife blade I flattened a strip on the back along the spine, which improved both its looks and the way it fits into the pelvic section.
I wanted to fit a Barbie head, but the neck of the Armoury body is too wide and the plastic is just too thin to sand down or to reduce its diameter by cutting a wedge out, so I decided to bend the edge of the neck inwards using a heated up blade of an old screwdriver (I did so in a well ventilated area as heated ABS plastic may emit toxic fumes).
Once the neck had roughly the correct diameter I let it cool down and sanded the edge smooth.
One thing I noticed after dressing the body was that there is no room under the armpits for clothes, so the arms can not be put straight down when dressed.
I tried to fix that by sanding down the insides of the upper arms and by sanding down the sides of the chest but this resulted in just 1mm of clearance between the arms and the chest. Clothes with sleeves are usually thicker than that but at least the arms can now be lowered a bit further.
To be fair this problem is not unique to these Armoury bodies: several other bodies (Soldier Story's LM v2 among others) also have this issue.
After reshaping the body I was happy with its improved looks, so I dulled down the high gloss of the body to a slight sheen using a grade 1800 sanding sponge.
