Indeed Melissa, the default renderer in Creo is nearly as old as Pro|E itself... well at least as of V18 that I know. Even though it has a few facelifts on the interface, overall it has not created better renderings and worse, we've lost a lot of presets that use to be included as an additional graphics library.
There is an optional program we can purchase as an extension called PhotoLux. This will make all the difference in the world, for the price, but you really have to need it to consider it. It is about $1000 and then you add yearly maintenance. From conversations, people often buy different solutions that are more powerful and/or easier to use.
But there are a few things you can do. In the core Creo, you can significantly improve the quality of the scene when using the Shade with Reflections setting. You can improve the quality by tweaking the model display and entity display in the configuration dialog. You can change the room scene and tweak the lighting. Eventually, you might even get a better rendering using the realtime renderer than PhotoRender will produce.
I simply don't have the patience to set up PhotoRender. It is seriously disappointing and outdated.
