Hi Murphy,

Your results are very good. The first time I imported a POSER model in VUE it looked like dead meat ! LOL !

Here is an example of how to light a POSER character in VUE.

The first thing that you should do is reducing the nasty ambient lighting. In the light panel of the ATMOSPHERE EDITOR, set the light balance to 80 or 90 % sunlight. Leave a little bit of ambient light, otherwise there will be too much contrast in your final render. For indoor scene I always set fog and haze to 0%, I also delete the sun so I can start with a clean work space.

The picture above is an example of a VUE light set-up. The model comes straight from POSER (it's DAZ's Stephanie with a custom texture and DNA separates clothes). I didn't change anything on it. The VUE scene was rendered in "broadcast quality" (no post editing).

I used a classic lighting method : key light, fill light and backlight.

The KEY LIGHT (in yellow) is a quadratic spotlight with a 50% shadows density. This is the direct light source : it create the main shadows and the tone of the scene.

The FILL LIGHTS (in green) are very soft quadratic pointlights with no shadows. With shadows they would destroy the reality of the lighting. The power of these lights is very low (15-20) and they have all different colors (bright yellow, cream and soft red). These lights create a soft ambience, a "global" illumination, without disturbing the key light. As long as they are not noticeable, you can place them wherever you want !

The BACK LIGHT, a point light with no shadows, is very important. With it you add depth to the scene and separate the model from the background. You should put it in the light cone of the key light, otherwise the scene will look strange.

This method works best for indoor scene, but you can try it for outdoor landscape :
Keep the sun, but reduce it's shadow density to 40-50% (you'll never see shadows with 100% density in reality ! it's an abstract 3D concept). Reduce also the light exposure (i.e. -0.50). Then use key, fill and back lights to give more depth and sharpness to the objects in your scene or to direct the eyes of the audience on one important element.

Sometimes more than 10 fill lights are necessary to create the right atmosphere. One of Renderosity's most talented artist (Carles P) used 90 point light for his "backyard" picture ! and the result is amazing.

On other softwares (C4DXL7, Lightwave 7, Studio Max, etc...) "radiosity" does the job for you, but where is the fun ? I never use radiosity in C4DXL7, it takes hours to render and doing the light setting myself always produce more "creative" results.

Hope this will help you,

:) Eric