Putting emotion into digital characters is incredibly difficult. One way to help would be to maybe make two people pose their hands the way you like, and take photos from it from different angles so you have a good reference of what the hands and fingers should really be posed like. Its easy to make a pose that "doesnt quite look natural" but it can be very hard to find out whats making it look unnatural.

Apart from that, good textures can definitely help. But its really difficult to make skin look realistic in bryce, because there is no such thing as sub-surface scattering..

One way you could use to fake sub-surface scattering is to use extremely blurry refraction/transparency. Basically, you use diffusion (and maybe ambience) for the surface color, speculairty for specular highlights etc. and transparent color for the subsurface scattering color. The blurry refractions will make the object look less transparent, but still translucent. But it will still most likely look different from real human skin i think..

Maybe you'll be able to tweak the look you want by combining a few renders in photoshop? One with a strong subsurface scattering effect with blurry refractions, then another without scattering effects, and maybe even a separate render for specular effects only? You could then combine them in photoshop, blend the translucency in where needed, etc. without having to re-render the thing over and over.

(_/)
(='.'=)
(")(")This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your signature to help him gain world domination.