VAM 1 already looks good enough. The main problem are the bad skin textures and lighting and sometimes horrible facial expression morphs. Which are all the scene creator fault, not VAM.
For skin textures I recommend
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(I use this one for 90% of my customized looks currently)
For lighting you can strip the scene from all lights using scene stripper plugin and load a lighting preset using a subscene and UIAssist. Also don't forget to reduce lights to 0 in the scene lighting tab. Subsurface scattering plugin also improve the looks a little bit.
The main problem with VAM 1 is that it’s hard to upgrade. Meshed can’t meaningfully update the game without breaking plugins and scenes. All the other issues come from that.