gohanf22...

Lifelike renders? Here's the scheme that works quite well for me.

1. Start with a quality character. Most textures that come with freebees are, well... limited.

2. Run Scene Fixer on your scene.

3. Run EZSkin on your character. Preview Mode works well on anything other than an extreme closeup. (Both scene fixer and ezskin are available for free here.)

4. Make sure SSS, Raytracing, and Gamma Correction are enabled in your render settings. Raytrace bounces set to 4 will handle most situations. Set Irradiance caching to about 50. Make sure indirect light is checked. Set Indirect light quality to about 15. Pixel samples to 5. Min shading rate to .3

5. Don't use a lighting set. Instead use BB's envdome and one infinite light set for 12% for outside, or one or more point lights positioned where lights would actually be in the room for inside. All lights should have minimum shadow bias set to .1. Point lights should have Attenuation set to inverse square. All lights intended to cast shadows should be set to Raytrace shadows. (BagginsBill's Envsphere is available for free here.)

6. Render in background.

Of course, you can consider your other option, which is to learn the material room and how all the nodes work, plus get a grip on how Poser's lighting simulation approximates real physics.

I prefer the first solution, because BagginsBill and Snarleygribbly have already done this for us (God Bless 'em!)

The solution I've posted works well for me, and will usually get you 90% of the way there. The rest is tweaking.