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.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/23774/tutorial/Vue-6-Infinite-Render-Settings

For realism, lighting is the critical component.  Use soft shadows and reduce the shadow density. 

Thank you very much.

My lighting tutorial may help, too :)

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html

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

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).

Thank you so much. It is actually an outdoors scene, a beach, a sunset and Poser characters.

Quote - Thank you so much. It is actually an outdoors scene, a beach, a sunset and Poser characters.

That's an ideal scenario for HDR lighting.

Actually, if you have Poser, you probably already have a very good lightprobe to use-- look in the Poser HDR VFX  or Image based lighting Lights folder . . . there is a "lagoon" lighting rig, I think . . . the image that's being used there is a beach scene, and you can load it into the environment map in Vue

How do you load a light scene from Poser to Vue, I have never done that? I am still new at Vue.

The idea here is that you're using a picture of the background to light the scene-- not individual lights. That's part of the HDR technology idea, its called "image based illumination" (or "IBL" for short).  If you think about a person walking outside on a sunny day, he's being lit by "everything".  HDR lighting is a special kind of picture that works very well for lighting scenes.. What I was saying is that Poser had one of these pictures of a beach scene, as I recall.

For starters, you need to get your scene set up for this in Vue so: import your Poser scene into Vue, and set it up with the "stock" Vue HDR illumination.

You can do this from the "Atmosphere" top menu-- its under Effects:Others. Do a render with the default Vue settings . . . once you've got that working, you can move on to swapping in other lighting environments

Don't be surprised if your first render comes out with the characters looking a little dark-- that's what photos of a real person ourdoors on a sunny day look like -- using this technique, you usually need to add a little "fill"light, just like you would in a real photograph

Thank you. I will try that. :)