Great! I'm glad you got that working!
The reason the render looks a little gray and washed out is likely two things. First, lighting. I suspect you just used the headlamp for that render (Default 'camera' light that is on if you haven't added any lights to the scene yet. The headlamp goes away one you add the first light.) Lighting is the hardest part of art, whether it's creating renders or professional photography, and it can make a huge difference to the quality of the render. Mastering lighting just takes time and practice, and I recommend watching videos on lighting techniques to get a start. If you pay close attention in BEW, you can see how I struggle with lighting throughout the game, but get it a lot better towards the end than the earlier stages of the game.
Mastering lighting just takes time and practice, but there are standard 3 light techniques that help.
As far as render settings, that's a whole different mess. Render settings has to do as much with how light is simulated as anything else, so lighting + render settings together will make or break a render. Posing, dressing, backgrounds are all simple compared to render settings and lighting.
I found the following free script plug-in for Daz that I use constantly to adjust render settings for me, leaving me just to deal with the lights. The script can be found at
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/16085/ and turns most render settings into something as simple as selecting the quality you want. Higher quality = longer render times. I start with Draft quality to check my basic lighting and shadows when I have new camera angles, which usually takes a few seconds to 3 minutes to render depending on scene complexity, and then move to the highest quality that I can render within 30 minutes, using Average as the minimum. Some bar scenes took 1 hour to render at Average quality. Some office scenes took 20 minutes at Very High quality. Lighting and scene complexity are the biggest factors. but the scripts that automagically change the render settings for you are all you really need until you start worrying about transparency (Glasses, water) then you have to fiddle with Raytracing a bit.
Raytracing is how many times light will bounce and reflect from surfaces. Generally a setting of 2 or 3 is fine, but anytime you have glass or water in the scene that should be transparent, I increase it to 6. Higher raytrace = longer render times.
I also tend to always set the lights that I want to cast shadows to Raytrace rather than Shadowmap for more realistic shadows.
When it comes to lighting, I'd recommend starting with a standard 3 light setup (Key, Fill, Backlight) to get the basics. If characters begin to look plasticy, it's due to poor lighting.
When you start feeling adventuresome, you can move to UberArea and UberEnvironment lighting which makes characters look awesome, but it's more complex to use. For Reference in BEW, the intro and office scenes were done with three light setups, (Plus an area light to simulate the sun coming in through the windows of the office.) The beginning of the Bar was also using three light setups, but somewhere in the middle of the conversation with Faith I switched to an UberArea Panel for the Key light which makes skin tones, (especially SSS mats) look great.
Looks like you are definitely on the right track! Getting good renders just takes practice.
Wolfschadowe