Hi guys,
I have been reading this thread, among others, to try and get a better understanding as to how I can make my renders look more realistic, or life-like, but since I am very new to the 3D graphics world the whole thing is extremely confusing. I have read many of bagginsbill's posts, all of which have been very interesting, although most of what I have read leaves me more confused than when I started...   lol  
(no fault to you BB...)

But I would still like to improve the quality of my 3D images, so I am still trying to understand all of this and rereading the posts here. 

I recently got the basic skin shader and bagginsbill's lights, and thank you for making those available, as well as all the tips and other things you have given freely to the community. Can anyone explain how to use the basic skin shader, I just copied the file and pasted it into notepad, but I am utterly confused as to where to go from here...
It is a python script I assume, so all I need to do is put it in the python folder perhaps?  and then run the script from the python window within poser?  

I'm sorry if these questions are as dumb as they get, but like I said I am very new to all of this, although I do have some experience with photoshop, I am totally new to 3D in general.

I am using photoshop 7, poser 7 and 3DS max 8...

I also have the V3 SAE figure, along with her head and body morphs, but only the low res textures, *(I think it's pretty bad that daz wants yet another 30 smalls for the high res textures for a model I already have paid almost 100 for, and after all the money I have already given them, but that is another discussion altogether...  lol).

I've looked at many of your renders and am really impressed with the results you are getting... 

Any help from you guys would be very much appreciated!

I find the lighting issue to be extremely difficult to deal with inside of poser, since the "pose" view looks SO much different than how it looks after being rendered. The rendered image looks so completely different that I find myself finally just settling with the best render I can get instead of making the right adjustments and getting better and better results...  make sense?
I suppose just a basic example of how to use the basic skin shader might be a good place for me to start, and just sort of go from there..

I doubt I will ever have the level of understanding that you guys have, but I sure would like to make better images and make some big improvements in my gallery, being quite unsatisfied at present with my results. My images look flat and lifeless, which is a major disappointment after putting in so many hours working on them.

thanks..

Marcus