hello guys, i kind of need help with rendering in maya. i think i do nice models but have not been able to get wonderful final images.

i believe i need to work on my rendering skills. any ideas on how to make a scene look next to a real photograph instead of looking cartoon-like.

Hey jemit, how r u doing. It's been a while. I've been seeing your stuffs around, keep it up.

To make your scene next to real photograph, you have to understand the basics of lighting, study how light affects your environment, you can also study real photograph to figure out what is missing in your scene like surface detail, specularity, reflections and so on.

As you might have learnt there are you major ways of rendering a scene, you either do direct illumination or indirect illumination(GI). To really achieve something realistic, you have to use indirect illumination(GI) which produce more accurate illumination. For more info you can search Google for tutorials on rendering with GI using mental ray.

Hope have been able to help in a way.