Basically what I do for lighting is:
1: Turn off the ambient light, it will make for a much more realistic render.
2: Use the default light with a soft shadow. Make sure you lock the lights to the model so you dont lose their position when turning and positioning the lights.
3: Position a light bulb above and slightly in front of the model you are rendering.
4: Use another direction light slightly above and in from of the model aiming at the front corner of the model. I typically change the color of this light. Ohhh, my render just finished, if worthy i will post it....and its not.
5: For the room, lower the ceiling just above the model and use fresnel reflect set at 50% reflectivity, that will give you the shininess desired on paint and chrome.
6: It is not necessary to use 10 scans for ray tracing, 5 will do and keep your rendering time down. The lower the anti-ailiasing percentage is set and the higher the scans are set the better the render will be, these settings at high detail require a fairly powerful computer or you will be waiting for your render for a while.
7: If you are having problems with your textures looking blah it is most likely just the shininess settings. It took me a while to figure out the settings needed to make realistic metals and paints. Here are my paint settings from the car render.
color: red 255/ green 0/ blue 0 color intensity: 50/ ambient 50 (doesnt matter if not using ambient light.
highlight color:red 242/ green 140/ blue 0color highlight:shine 100/ intensity 80 Reflectivity: 27 All others not mentioned are lowest setting.
It is possible to get a nice render with just three lights, its basically all i ever use. If your textures are not setup correctly, the lighting wont matter. FYI...most things do not need to be set as shiny as you would think, atleast not the intensity. Its typically ok to set the shininess fairly high as longa s the intensity is turned down. Hope this helps, sorry so long, just trying to spread some knowledge.