Making the viewport more realistic

Do you have a high-end GPU? I don't really use Maya, but it's my understanding it has an option called "Viewport 2.0", which is a GPU-hardware accelerated viewport display setting that can use Arnold render's real-time engine. This should display high quality, realtime results with environment fog, soft shadows, motion blur, etc. Did you try enabling the Viewport 2.0 and play around with settings?

If you want to make Maya viewport 2.0 more realistic, first you need to add lights to your scene. The second thing you need to know is to turn on the light icons on top of the view port bar. Then from the same bar, you can go to viewport 2.0 settings and turn on ambient occlusion and increase anti-aliasing. That way your viewport rendering enhances to a great extent. Let me know if you need some screen shots.

Well, I'm totally a newcomer in this website, and I'm trying to be helpful to others. It's good to use the experience of some older members like you though. You mean this guys posts here and doesn't show up afterwards?

I still don't get why you don't want to render in DAZ 3D what it is thought for (great results and shaders already set up for you)....
Otherwise you should look up how to set up shaders in Maya then.