Originally posted by flib
...also fixed the lightning (took me hours :/)
Here's a quick route to easy renders of your models that also look good. It takes about 5 minutes to set up...
(1) Delete all the lights from your scene
(2) In Render Globals, open the Common tab and switch off "Use Default Lights"
(3) Also in the Render Globals, switch to Mental Ray and - in the MR tab - turn the quality to PreviewFinalGather.
(4) Open up the Final Gather section in Render Globals and turn the number of rays down to 350
(5) In the viewport, click View->Camera Attribute Editor...
(6) In the Camera Attribute Editor open up the Environment section and change the color to say a 30% grey.
Now render that.
If your PC is fast, you can ramp up the number of FG rays but you'll find that your render times increase dramatically.
Also, you can include a low power directional light with shadows switched on to give nices shadow off your model.
Hope that helps.
That'll do donkey... that'll do...