I've watched many Blender tutorials; they make everything look simple, because the person doing it knows what he is doing. But when I try to do things, it doesn't work. The only way to learn something like this (and I believe that this applies to education in general) is to have an knowledgeable person watch what I'm doing and say, "Wait, that won't work! Here is what you must do:" My render looks nothing like yours and I don't have a clue why there is a huge difference. Since I don't know what is wrong, I don't know what to do to 'fix it'. And I don't think the problem is with Blender. If I used another program I would expect to have the same problems. So I've just given up on rendering models until I can see a way out of the no-way-forward problem.