Yeah I did and no it's not real life characters from soft porn.
I do take inspiration from people that surround me, from friends and family to co-workers and just people I see in the street every day, and I try to reflect that in my character designs. Which means adding imperfections, because I feel those are the
pillars that'll allow you to latch on to a look, and grow attached to it.
So yeah, after that initial idea for a look, then there's a lot of fiddling with sliders, but that was a learning process for me as well, and after landing smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley try after try I finally found out what worked for me and what you see in LomL now is the result.
As to the why, well after seeing the same boringly perfect faces every time in every VN I played, I got so tired of it that I decided that if I ever created a VN I would not go with OotB beauties straight from the Daz3d store.