Attached Link: Material Room, Nodes & Shaders - Tutorials and Discussions (Bookmarks - Updated)

Since your render settings are mild, that's not the problem.

Light sets comprising 5 or more lights were usually developed before Poser 6. The key issue at that time was that there was no clean way to simulate ambient or secondary lighting. Some huge light sets were developed involving many lights, arranged in a global pattern, to approximate global illumination. Also, they were usually designed to use depth-mapped shadows instead of ray-traced shadows. If the depth-mapped shadow sizes were large, the DM shadow maps can take up a lot of memory.

Assuming you have P6 or better (if you said what you have, I missed it) you should not use any sets like that. They are slow, inaccurate, and memory pigs.

If you have P6 or P7 or PPro, you should be using only two lights for outdoors - an IBL and an infinite. For night, the infinite will be the moon. For day, the sun. In either case, you choose an image to use on the IBL (Image Based Light) to simulate the secondary lighting. These are not ordinary images, but rather they are in a particular format, called Angular Map format, and are often called IBL Probes. They look like mirror balls. Some people actually use mirror ball photos, and they can work OK. Since you're just starting out, any use of IBL will be an improvement, even if you use it "wrong".

Once you get past basic IBL lighting, then you want to learn the techniques to make such lighting more accurate, particularly if you're trying to mix 3D content with a real photographic background, so that the lighting of the 3D elements is in agreement with the photographic elements. If not using a photo and everything is 3D, then you have more freedom to use somewhat more arbitrary IBL probes. IBL does not actually require images, but can be configured entirely with nodes, in the advanced material room. I often use such setups to demonstrate things where I'm not seeking total realism with the lights, but rather I'm demonstrating some technical aspect of lighting or shaders. Or I'm trying to make a demo scene that I can give to other people and not worry about copyright issues associated with re-distributing somebody elses light probe.

If you have Poser 8 or Poser Pro 2010 Beta, you can skip the whole fake-ambient IBL and use its Indirect Diffuse Light (IDL) feature, which performs a global illumination calculation to take all secondary (bounced) light between scene elements into account.  Don't confuse IDL with IBL, and don't think you can't use both at the same time - you can.  IDL comes at the expense of some additional render time, but gives superior results.

Once your lights start to do their job better, you will then find your materials are faulty, and you improve them. Then you find your lights are faulty and improve them again. Round and round you go. I've been at it for 5 years, and while I've learned a lot (and had a ton of fun in the process) I still have a far way to go.

Once you start looking into materials, particularly shiny things, you'll want to understand the use of an environment sphere, which will both contribute to IDL and make IBL pointless, as well as provide detailed data for reflections.

Since I am a prolific poster on lighting and shaders, you can't go wrong trying to find more info about these subjects by using the Rendo and RDNA search engines. Look for posts by me, using words you're interested in, such as "IBL", "IDL", "skin", "glass", "metal", "chrome", "mirror", "lake", "ocean", "slime", "gold", "diamond", ... etc.

If your searches don't yield info you want, ask us to help find stuff. I can roughly remember where there are about 1000 interesting threads to read, off the top of my head.

Also, at the top of this forum is a sticky thread where we collect links to important threads on shaders and lighting. I've directly linked you to it in this post.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)