For me I’d say lighting was the defining aspect when it came to making images pretty. No matter how cool the model I was modeling was, when it came to making an actual render, it always came out so bad, unpleasant, bland, insipid and I couldn’t really point out to what was actually going on, because the model looked so cool on the 3D viewport. Little by little I think I started to realize it was all about lighting and composition, I wish I had known that earlier.
Get a simple model and lit it well and make a good composition, turns out great… get a cool model and fail at those, it’s game over. So after realizing those things I started to focus more on trying different light setups over and over again, moving the camera over and over, and I think after that my renders started to get better.
Also the technical aspects of light bounces and global illumination and all that sort of stuff eluded me for quite a while, how the render engine had a hard time in confined spaces.
