Quote - Hi! First time posting. I've not had much time in RL to play with Reality, but I lave it. Now I need to learn lighting and how to adjust settings etc. Anyone know of good tutorial? Critism is always welcome. I need all the help I can get. LOL Well here's my first pix. Definetly need help with the lighting. Thanks.

Welcome to the forums, kalazar1! First I 'd like to say that this isn't a bad render at all for an early try, and I think it should not take much to get it the way your want it.

What lighting are you using? There are three main kinds of Reality lights (and I generally recommend you use only Reality lights and not DAZ lights): mesh lights, which are planes set to emit light in Luxrender; Sun, which is a special Luxrender distant light, and is pretty much as the name suggests; and IBLs (image based lighting). They all have their uses, and can be mixed to a certain extent, but I strongly recommend starting out with mesh lights as they really work like photographic lighting or real-world lights, and I find them very intuitive to use. My advice, therefore, would be to start with Reality mesh lights in a classic photographer's 2 or 3 point lighting set up. I use a 3-point set up usually, but often 2 will create good results. If you Google "3 point lighting" you will see lots of diagrams of the idea, of which there are many variations.

The main light (called "key") and the second light (called "fill") are typically either side of your camera pointing inwards towards the subject and in more or less the same plane as the camera. This means that you will not have a straight-on light which will kill all the modelling in the face and other features of your subject. The fill light will generally be of lower intensity, but you can play about with the balance between the two in Luxrender and see the effects in real time. Although it's considered best to get the intensities set in Reality, this generally takes some experience as you are doing it "blind".

The third light is a backlight, which may be directly behind the subject, so that you can't see the actual light (which must also be quite small), or behind on one side and above the camera frame so that it cannot be seen. Backlights are really effective in popping your subject out from the background, but you might want to experment with this once you are more experienced.

Finally, I think it's important, or even essential, to have your character in a 3D set, rather than having a 2D background matted in. This enables the proper use of shadows and real depth of field (DOF). I aways set cameras to DOF and then determine how in or out of focus background objects are by setting the aperature; a large F stop (i.e. a small aperture) will have more of your scene in focus. Having background objects (or extreme foreground objects) out of focus, even if only slightly, adds a lot of realism to your scene. It does, however, mean setting your camera properly. If you are having problems getting your subject sharp, Reality can help you. In your Studio scene tab, select an eye of your subject (for example), or add a null object positioned where you want the focus and select that. Makes sure this is selected before launching Reality. In the cameras tab in Reality, turn on DOF (if it isn't on already) and click "Set Focus". That will focus the camera on the selected object in your scene. You can widen the DOF after that, if you wish, with the F stop setting. I find that I usually need quite a large F stop value (small aperture) for the sort of scene I do, otherwise the DOF is too shallow.