Attached Link: http://www.debevec.org/Research/IBL/

> Quote - Can someone tell me which render setting in Vue Esprit 6 will give the picture a real look and softness? I want the scene to look like a photograph.

One question to ask is: "What kind of photograph?"

There's a tendency to think of "real" world lighting as being "all the same -- its just real". But the hard shadows of a sunny day in Arizona are very different from the very soft interior light of an overcast day in Seattle

In general, the difference between CG lighting and real world lighting has been the low dynamic range of the CG environment (meaning the distance from the brightest brights to the darkest darks in a scene).

The guy who did something about this was a graphics researcher named Paul Debevec-- he pioneered a lot of High Dynamic range technology. The fastest, easiest way to make your Vue scene look real is to use the HDR atmosphere-- its not perfect, but you'll get "very good" very easily. I've attached a link to some of his early work which describes pretty much the problem that you've got "how do I make a rendered image match a photograph". Vue has an excellent and simple HDR lighting mode (just load the HDR atmosphere to get started).