Quote - You can do the same in Reality. The reflection strength is controlled by the brightness of the specular color. The amount of "polish" of a specular surface is controlled by the glossiness strength. You don't have to micromanage the materials because they have physical attributes, something that you don't have in Studio. The best way to approach Lux and Reality is to avoid thinking of them as "3Delight on steroids." Using the 3Delight midset with Reality/Lux is a surefire path to frustration and bad results. You need to think like a photographer and work in the context of realistic materials. Once you do that the results will happen right away.

Please don't hesitate asking more questions if you need.

It's definitely going to take some time for me. I literally zero experience as a photographer (I rarely even use my phone camera), so trying to think like one is probably not doing my renders much good at the moment. I think the difficulty for me is largely that the render times are quite longer than 3Delight, so I don't tend to notice that I'm not getting the intended results until it's done a fair number of samples.  As for materials, that one will continue to be a bit of a stumbling block. As I mentioned earlier, subsurface scatter is something I can't seem to find an option for. Glossy materials don't appear to support it. In fact, it's one of the reasons I'm looking at grabbing Reality 3 when it's released for its dedicated Skin shaders. Another thing I'm used to doing (albeit largely to work with biased renderers) is being able to set a texture to full ambient so it's bright whatever the lighting (useful for things like Jepes' ThrowZ).

That said, there is one thing I'm very curious about and that's the "Load Shaders" option in the drop down. Does this only load ACSEL shaders made through Reality? I downloaded some Lux materials from the site, but there doesn't seem to be a way to integrade those shaders into Reality. It probably seems like an obvious answer, but considering the drop down has options which actually **specify **they're ACSEL, and that one doesn't I just had to query it.