I would say some of both, trust me, it takes a huge amount of learning to get Max stuff to look real. It's all about learning about material properties and light. You have to take a real hard look at what actually happens in the real world even without complex fx like caustics, you need to look at light & texture and the interactions between them, and learn a lighting rig that works in each application for the type of picture/animation you're working on. There's no bigger compliment then someone thinking that one of your renders is a photo

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.