I seem to have problems with the skin of my rendering looking plastic  and fake, how do I get the skin to look more real, is it the lighting or my render settings?

Thank you

ladyperiwinkle, it always helps to include a rendered image. This helps to give you the best advice possible. Some textures seem to look ok but don't look as good with out good lighting setup, while others look good with your lighting setup but need certain render settings to enhance it even better. This is where having a rendered image helps us to help you get the most out of  your renders.

95% of poser renders look like plastic and even the renders made by the gurus of poser look like plastic figures 99% of the time. Incidently all my renders look like plastic. Embrace the plastic!

In addition to the example image, can you also post a screen capture of your render settings? 

It can be in the material setup, in th lighting or in your render settings, or some combination of two or even all three of the above.
It's really hard to tell without seeing some samples, and what your settings are right now - since there are many ways for renders to go into the plastic look.

I just use the auto render setting I slide it all the way over and have the smooth box  checked.

Chances are this won't help you with your problem because the plastic looks is often the result of the material room settings and/or lights.

However, try these render settings.

This is what I use.

The bucket size is variable and what you set it at will largely depend on your computer's memory. It  can be adjusted by values of 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8  if you need to lower  the value if you find that you are running out of memory when rendering.  If you have a powerful computer with lots and lots of memory, you can increase the bucket size to 512.

What does the bucket size do?

Bucket is that busy little square that looks like it's rendering things.  Smaller bucket size can help when running out of memory.

The sheen that you have on the skin seems to be material related. Look at the swimsuit, and how the sheen is not as visible. If it's the lights or render settings, the sheen would be a lot more visible on the swimsuit too.

Now, about which exact material setting would help... I don't know off the top of my head. Maybe our material room Demi-God, Bagginsbill will notice thread and help with specific settings :)

Poser renders certainly do not have to look plastic. Key considerations even more than lighting setup is a good bump map and specular map. The specular map is absolutely key to this in that specularity is "merged with the texture" so to speak. Specularity will be rendered with the small deformations present in skin texture. If specularity is applied without a specmap and bump map the render engine is just seeing a smooth surface and perfectly smooth is what your going to get no matter what lights you use. Also you can use blinn in addition to a specmap but do so sparingly.
The link is to an image in my gallery, its an example of realistic skin although the bump is set a little high in this particular image.
(It is a nude chest so if such things offend dont go there)[

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1653412](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1653412)

Yikes. Another realism convert.

You're in for a lot of work.

In a nutshell:

Lighting
Shadows
Shaders
Pose
Expression
Geometry
Context

All of those are important. Get any wrong, and it fails.

Now for realistic skin, you must do something about:

Conservation of energy
Fresnel effect
Subsurface scattering
Gamma correction

First you must learn what those really mean. Then you must learn to apply them in a skin shader.

Search for "realism", "realistic skin", or those phrases above, in posts by face_off or me, here in this forum. As you go farther back in time, you will see me do stuff way wrong, very wrong, slightly wrong, etc., which can be amusing, and can help you avoid reinventing a bad wheel. I pretty much documented everything I tried, showing how it worked better or didn't work better. It is good to understand all the different techniques, though not strictly necessary.

Or you can wait for me to finish my free skin shader system, part of my Versatile Shader System - VSS. If you can't wait, and want to experiment with it, try the preview release of VSS. There is a 23+ page thread on it.

Search the Poser gallery for VSS. (Lots of artists trying it out - let's you see what it does)

VSS thread.

VSS is meant to be a one-click shader solution for any figure. It's not quite that perfect yet.

There is a ton of info in that thread. Please read it before asking questions regarding problems you run into. Most problems have been discusssed one way or another by now. Some do not yet have solutions.