I have been working on recreating this.  Some of you helped me in the hair area.  Now I have a whole new set of problems.

Never mind the posing for right now, I understand some of that is off so Im taking a little artistic license with that, as well as still have some work to go.  Im also not concerned with her facial features looking like the painting.

Right now what I'm worried about is lighting and render settings.   I had a render setting that was going great for me - until I turned on texture filtering to see what would happen.  Then the stuff hit the fan.  I started getting dark marks on every render that looked almost like dirty/crazy shadows.  I changed the lights about 50 times to no avail.  I closed and loaded back to a previous saved point - same problem.  Finally I just saved the poses and reloaded the characters as a new file.

I do not have any clue what all the different render settings, material functions do - so if you care to try to give me an outline of what I should check and what numbers to input in order to achieve a look as close as possible to the original, I would appreciate it (postworking is going to be necessary but I'd like to minimize it).

Next Lighting.  I have tried so many light set ups my head is spinning.  If I need a new set I'd prefer a freebie suggestion from RDNA.  What lights - type of lights would you suggest?  What is this cast shadow business all about?

Any and all advice and suggestions will be useful, 
Thanks in advance.

looks very nice IMVHO. use an hdri that was made from a forest scene.

what is an HDRI?

~edit~  woops forgot nudity advisory on first post - sorry : /

high dynamic range image there are 4 in the P7 textures folder. the only one that comes close to a forest scene is hdrvfx_pond....002.hdr view hdri files in APS CS3 et al.

"APS CS3 et al."

I need a translator for that part lol.

I am using Poser 6.

APS CS3 = Adobe Photoshop CS3
Or you could use HRDIShop which is free :)

I'm with Nancy on the HDRI or IBL. I'd tint it a yellow ochre, too. You need a RayTrace light to cut through the hair but a soft Shadowmap spot for the mainlight could be nice. face_off had success with these settings for mainlight (enclosed). Some distant start/end to focus the highlight of the mainlight. Classic feel,, If you tint the backgound to a color close to this pic,, it can really help. Turn OFF shadows and "visible in RT" on hair until last final render. Click "save shadowmaps" before you render with this. Saves you time while tweaking..

I would use ibl and two point lights, each set to about 40% intensity.

it appears dosch has some hdri forest scenes. they likely cost $$$.

jjroland - Do you have photshop?  I think the female figue is going to need to be overexposed somehat; and, in contrast, the snake will neeed to be underexposed.  This could be most easily accomplishd by rendering them seperate, exporting .PNGs, and then layering the images in photoshop.

I also concure that the light you use will need to be yellow.  I always use infinite lights, of equal Intensity.  It looks light the first light is'nt at 0, 0, 0 though.  More like the yRotate = -45, xRotate = 0, zRotate = 0. My next guess is that there is only one other light at yOrbit = -45,  xRotate = -45, and zRotate = 0.

What hair is that, it's very attractive?  If you'd care to gove credt to whomever created he skin texture, and INJ, I'd be all ears for that too?

yes I have a horrible memory - (but had noted myself to add the info to final render).

The skin texture is Catalina that I purchased from here for V4 - I can't find the read me for name of creator atm - might have been named "readme".
The Eye texture is from DMs Nanette.  (hazel)
The snake is done with easy pose snake from CP.
The Hair is April Sylphiad from Daz3d.

and my favorite - the face morphs were done as a favor to me by Pjz here at renderosity =)
The rest of the body is my own doing.

Thank you for all the suggestions.  Im going to give them all a try tomorrow.  There seem to be so many variables with lighting, I begin to wonder if I will ever be able to keep track of it all : p

I do have photoshop.

Ouh, April Sykphiad; by AprilYSH, at Daz3D!

Thank you very much!

Was it:

by corvas?

That is correct. = )

If you're using Photoshop CS then here's a neat little trick I just learned about from moose over at PlanIt 3D.  It uses the 'Match Color' tool.

www.unfocusedbrain.com/projects/match_color/

OMG!  That is an awsome thing to know, thank you slinger, I'm sure jjroland will appreciate this!

Wow that really is awsome.  TY for that link!

Unfortunately last night - one of my brand new ram sticks decided to die.  It initially kept happening while I had poser open - so assuming incorrectly the culprit I uninstalled poser.  Now after I install the new ram today - I will have to go through the dreaded process of making sure all the correct content is installed - then I can go through the "poser cant find this" yaya for about a day and half and then finally I shall have my scene back = )

(I did have the foresight to save the scene somewhere else before uninstalling thankfully)

P6's CollectSceneInventory.py is great for this.  It will save a copy of your scene, along with a copy of every external file the scene uses.  And put it all in to the same folder, for you to zip, and archive.  It's just no friendly with any files that are compressed, like .OBZs.