What are good lights for just a character render? Id love for mine to look real like the previews you see here on the characters. Thanks.

GREAT question. Would love to find some NON-Iray lights myself

For 3DL, I used to like SaintFox's lights (you can probably find them in the store here), its been a while so I can't really make a lot of good recommendations for 3DL. Except Khory. Find her lights elsewhere, I don't think she brokers here.

For Iray, try OOT (outoftouch), jCade and Khory (you might find some oot lights in the store here)

Thank you I appreciate your help.

I have been using the InaneGlory Point and Shoot light sets. There are versions for both 3Dl and Iray. For 3Dl I usually used Point and Shoot 2. Point and Shoot 3 is basically Point and Shoot 2 with an added ring of light that I never used very much, so I would recommend Point and Shoot 2.

With 3Dl the default gamma is 1. To get more realistic lighting you need to use gamma 2.2 and turn on gamma correction for the textures. Gamma 2.2 is default with Iray, but not 3Dl.

With Gamma 2.2 light intensities fall off more realistically. This means you need less artificial ambient light generators. For portrait renders at Gamma 2.2 I found the straight Point and Shoot 2 lights were fine. The ring of light is basically to add ambient light, but found I did not need that.

There are issues with rendering at Gamma 2.2 in 3Dl. All the 3Dl material on products you buy for DS are designed to render at Gamma 1.0. Gamma correction fixes some of the material, but not all of it. I frequently had to reduce specular strength by a lot on hair and some clothing. I also reduce velvet strength on skins. A lot of hair has opacity maps where the Gamma of the texture is set incorrectly, which causes the hair to look very thin at Gamma 2.2. That need to be fix by setting the gamma to 1.0 on those opacity maps.

I now exclusively use Iray, so it has been a while since I used 3Dl.