To kick things off, I'm pulling a link from the archives to help you with rendering. I'm seeing some great stuff being rendered however the thing that stands out the most is the flatness in the renderings. By flatness, I refer to the even tone across the image which if you were to open the image in Photoshop and looked at the histogram you'd end up seeing a traditional bell curve:
This leads to a very flat, even toned image. What you want, is pizazz or in simple terms contrast. Some artists lean towards the crunchy side where you pull the distribution more to the dark side:
While you can approach this in post, it is not nearly as good as rendering with good lighting in mind. So to kick things off, here's a refresher on the old staple 3-point lighting:
