that link doesn't go anywhere... besides, if you just give a basic 3-point light setup you should be ok... clay renders tend to be blown out in a lot of places...

start with the key light (the light you have currently), and that's the brightest light you should have.

now, add a fill light on the opposite side of the key light, in the same position. the intesity of this light should be about 3/4 of your key light.

and lastly the backlight. it's a light that's in the same position (or maybe a little lower than your key and fill) but has about the same or less intensity as your fill, and is directly behind the subject.

keep in mind that the 3-point lighting method works best when the 3 lights are set in accordance to your rendering camera, not your model. if you set up the 3 lights and then change the camera angle, you can still get poor lighting. best way around this is to parent the lights to your camera... be aware this setup is only really recommended for showcasing a model, and not really for a scene.


another way to avoid the clay render but get a decent outcome is to render with mental ray... make a nurbs box, delete 3 of the 6 sides (top and two adjacent sides) and use this kinda like a display case you put your model into. open the active camera's attribute editor, and under environment change your background color to white (using hsv, i have simple values of 0,0,2). in render globals (settings, whatever) uncheck use default light at the bottom of the maya common options. under mental ray, enable final gather, and up your final gather rays to about 1000. give that a render, it should turn out pretty well... but rendering larger than 640X480 might take a little while... like a minute or four, depending on the speed of your computer and amount of ram.