Try to smooth the edges of right angles and add polygons/accents to those. Good examples are close-ups in architectural renderings (raytraced, non-realtime) where if you notice, most of the hard angles are smooth. Why? They add geometry more to those areas than to flat walls. For an interactive real time example, there is…
I just use a directional light and an ambient occlusion material in Maya to get good renders. For example this. http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2204/scifinamed.jpg It is literally a directional light, and a ambient light in the far hallway to add that bright effect. Then I just made a dark semi reflective surface for…