We at Designengine teach one week rendering workshops for both Maya and Alias Studio among other classes. We often tell the participants in our class that they should take a photography class before or after our render wee because the principals for creating realistic renders are all with respect to a Pentax K1000 - Wikipedia
I suggest starting there because you are realy playing until you master the basic principals of taking a shot. For example, every photographer knows to frame a chair or couch you use a lens over 135mm so and to photograph a flower you use a 35mm lens We have similar settings in Creo to frame an object.
Unfortunately we don't have all the cool render tools for rendering in Creo like we might want for experts.... you can imagine I push the developers tho. Creo render is much better than in the past however and for that I don't get beat up so bad when trying to push SW users learn Creo (my job most of the time is managing attitudes LOL) With the limitations we cant do a one week class in these tools but a product photography class will certainly help. For the record Maya was crated for the render and animation for the Jurassic park movie is used on absolutely every movie sense. For your information Maya uses a subset render tool cal Mental Ray and that is the same subset we use in Creo.
The cool new effect we get from utilizing mental ray is that we can place procedural map textures across and they like a parametric part are parameter-rized appropriately across nurbs surfaces. With that said we can also map decals that cross the nurbs surface. Couldn't do that in Wildfire. Also for your information SW is not significantly better or easier to learn. I get asked that a lot. SW does have better set of library textures which makes it harder for beginners to whip up a novice render.
Bart Brejcha
Design-engine.com
. If not, PTC provide 1 month testing licence for actual users (try to ask your PTC provider). 
