This paper presents an example-guided, anthropometry-based modeling method for creating 3D human body models from users' input of partial anthropometric measurements with a given example dataset. Rather than directly forming a mapping between the partial measurements and the body model, we first estimate a set of chosen 30 measurements from the input based on the example-oriented measurement analysis. We then create an initial 3D model using the example-oriented radial basis function model that maps the set of 30 measurements to the body shape space and is established based on the given examples. We finally refine the 3D model by constrained optimization to create the target body model. Our method has several advantages: (1) the created model is guaranteed to match the input measurements and reflects the shape characteristics of examples; (2) the input requirement is modest, which makes it useful in practice; and (3) the information of both the measurements and examples is fully utilized. We demonstrate the effectiveness, accuracy, flexibility and extensibility of the method by various experimental evaluations and a Kinect-based body customization application.