Dear Friend: What are the three main pointers to achieve realism in Vue 6 EspritL? How can I make Vue images generally appealing? I have purchased many computer graphics software and tutorials without luck on the topic. Thank you. Sincerely, Fidelity2.

Lighting, materials, and more lighting. 

A straight un-tweeked Vue render has 100% hard, dark shadows.  No matter what you do, unless you adjust the lighting, it will always look like a 3D render.  It can look good, but it will never look real unless you really work on the lighting. 

Same with the materials, too much bump, to little bump, wrong scale...  all help it look 3D.

Watch the tutorials over at GeekatPlay, show us what you are rendering, and keep asking how to make it better.  The best way to learn is to keep on Vueing!

Hello again.
Now, you've mentioned Poser 7 over in the forum where the riff raff go!
If you really want realism in your work, do it in Vue, to put it bluntly it dumps all over Poser!
You've got to work those lights. Global Radiosity & Global Illumination are wonderful features. Longer render times but it'll set you on the way for extra realism. Getting a good HDRI can help as well. Any of these 3 will give you the basis for realistic environmental lights.
The Quadratic spot lights are a beauty in Vue, work with the spread & falloff to get the effect you need. I also love working with volumetrics.
The basic atmospheres with Vue are very good, tweak them to give you even more of an edge.

Peggy is so right about the shadows. Only have them dark if they need to be, if I'm doing a general outside render I'll generally go around 75 - 80%. I like to use soft shadows as well. Again, it can hit render times, but it's worth it.
When I import from Poser I work on all the materials, changing specular, bump, colour etc. Basically trying to improve the materials to work with the lights I have in my scene.

Sorry if it's repetitive, but...
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html

have a read, and on my pther tutorials, ESPECIALLY the one on DIRT MAPPING, and go get my free dirt map material, it really does help a huge amount :)
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/vue_mats/dirt_mat.zip

As peggy said, Lighting is crucial

here, lighitng is defailt

Here, lighting is soft and render settings tweaked

And on this pic

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1642282

note how dirt effects applied with Vue procedurals mixed with image textures, gives a MUCH better effect than if they had been un-stained.

:)

i use lighting to cast shadows where i want them and fog effects for depth, having extras like TerraPack or monsoons SeaVue is an added advantage.
i'm not sure about Vue EspiriteL  what it can do and not do.
-Rich

And I'll add that if there are human (or equivalent, like anthropomorphic animals) characters in the scene, don't skimp on posing them.  Their body positions and facial expressions have to look believable. Using photographs as references is not cheating.

If you import models from Poser, be prepared to work on the materials. As an example, after importing I find I get a lot of materials with 97% black highlights. WTF. Setting it to 20 or 30% background colored highlights really helps. If you import DAZ or Poser humans, consider getting SkinVue. It doesn't do anything you can't do yourself, it just does it in a second instead of half an hour.

TerraPak does a very good job in teaching you how to set up an outdoor scene that is viewed from afar. The materials in my opinion don't look that good up close, but by the time you've finished the exercises you should be able to fix that. (I'm not knocking the product, it's chiefly designed to help produce beautiful scenery that is not viewed up close and personal. The explanation of the TerraPak materials alone is in my opinion worth the price and I'm a happy customer.)

I would say lighting and texturing are the most important things. one quick trick is to use image based lighting, but vue isnt very good at that.

Three words:  Three point lighting.  Do a search on google for three point lighting and you will quickly find out how photographers use light setups to achieve eye popping results.  With any 3d app, you must work the lights and shadows like a pro photographer other wise your results will be no better than if you used a poloroid.  Learn about lighting, then start tackling textures, scale, POV and composition.

Post lots of your images and absorb as much criticism as possible.  DON'T pay attention to the "excellent, gorgeous, the best I've ever seen" comments.  Pray for someone to be honest and point out where your images need work.  Look at lots of others work and see what makes it work and what makes it flop. 

4 words : Global Illumination, Global Radiosity! :-)

What kind of realism are you looking for? The techniques vary for different scenes. Outdoors? Interiors? Portraits? Still life?

Modelling is important too. Very sharp edges, which are the simplest to create, are unrealistic. Most real world objects have slighly rounded or "chamfered" edges that catch the light.

Work hard on your textures - study the real-world surface you're trying to imitate and the way it interacts with light, and imitate those properties in your materials.

Also, irregularity - completely uniform objects or surfaces are rare in nature.

So many good scenes are spoiled by too much ambient light, which flattens the image, lessesns depth, makes them look like cartoons or drawings. To imitate real world scenes, make sure the light is right.

A good definition of the kind of ambient light that spoils realism is "light that doesn't seem to be coming from anywhere" i.e. your eye cannot explain its source. it doesn't look like direct light, it doesn't look like indirect light bounced off or refracted through objects.

If it's Interiors you're interested in, check out Chipp Walters' new "InteriorPak" - www.altuit.com

Also, consider HDRI lighting - this can give very realistic renders.

Good stuff, CraftyCurate!

Though chamfering (straight edge) and filleting (round edge) adds up to huge loadof polygons, alas...but hey, 8 gigs of  RAM I don't mind :p
(part of my bid to move us all onto uber 64 bit HAL900 machines, hehe, man, it's like broadband vs dial up, never go back!)

but you know, for my stuff I like a touch of unrealism at times..Technicolor...cartooning... :)

and seriously, dirt mapping makes a huge difference and is dead easy, my way.

What I observed is that it's pretty hard to do "big" objects (houses, space stations, space ships) ; there's always a danger of the "toy look" even if these things are 100 m long (measured in Vue) and there are good details.

Compare the first image with the last, which was also the longest to render, and you can see the difference that lighting alone can make to an image. Getting lighting and textures to match is one of the hardest tricks to master (at least for me) as one really complements (or ruins) the other - with Vue, add in the possibilities of atmosphere and you can spend a long time trying all the possibilities - don't be afraid to play around (if you have the time) :-))

You really should take a look at that tutorial !!!
I bought it a couple days ago and that's certainly my best buy for Vue ( excepted for Vue itself of course :)
It includes any necessary lighting, objects and scenes to make similar images...
I was really delighted to see that suc a quality was possible in Vue6!

www.cornucopia3d.com/