Hello....new to rendering, help!

[chris poole]

Hello everyone. I have been designing and fabricating commercial foodservice equipment for 20 years. I have been working in 3D with solidworks only for a couple of years. I am currently trying to create a library of food items (food in pans you would see on a salad bar) to render in my equipment. I am not used to having rough surfaces to represent food items that I need to show. I am using SW to apply materials but I am confused on how SW photoworks360 works differently than SW to render the model. I am also interested in using 2D pics as backgounds, what I'm doing now looks pretty goofy. I am not familiar with any other rendering programs. Any help anyone here could offer would be greatly appreciated. Chris Poole