Noob here: Looking to recreate Val3dart's Masterpieces to learn.

Dice

I fell in love with Val3dart's Dforce Ren Outfit rendering and am trying to recreate it to learn how to create those beautiful shots.

You can see the inspiration here: https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-ren-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

I had to do a bit of detective work to figure out what Val used. To learn, I wanted to recreate one of his renders as close as I could but ended up being a mesh of a few of them as. Really loved the black on black background.

I used: 
Aiko 8 making adjustments in fitness, muscle content and other obvious enhancements.
Generated a Skin using Skin Builder 8.
Kawaii Magic Poses, also by Val. I looked through all of his products and could not find the exact pose from his shots. It seems this set is the closest.
Render Studio. 2 Side Lights. Left Key light.

Questions:

In Vals Renders, the hat is Black. In mine they are dark wooden brown-black. I'm fairly sure this is a lighting issue, but it seems super odd to me. Perhaps the angle of the lights or the model need to be adjusted to make the hat black, or I need to adjust the surfaces on the hat to reduce the color.

I seem to really suck at posing. I left the feet not flat in the render to illustrate the difficult of keeping it flat. I know i can just sit and work it out eventually, but is there a way to easily get something like shoes to just always point down? Like locking one of the rotations or something? What is best practice on getting objects to fit to another object. Like shoes on floors and butts on chairs?

Vals skin looks super awesome and mine is close. It's either the skins he's using or the lighting. I adjusted my lighting temps to 10k, to get a whiter light like val seems to have. This seems wrong to me, as 6500k is the default temp and should be pretty damn white.

I can't tell what Val used as his background. It looks like what I did, but his is much softer and chrisp on the floor. I don't know what is creating what looks like shadow artifacts. Probably the angle of my lights.

 

Any help to get closer to understanding the details to get closer to Vals original master pieces would be awesome.

 

Thanks!

 

-Dice