The software I use is Maya 2013 and I render with Mentalray. The main lightning in this scene are the lightspot, and I tried to make some sun ray passing through the windows on the left. For the outdour scene, it is a simple Physical sun and sky.
I can make clean work when it is just the modeling, but when the texturing/rendering/lightning comes, it takes me days and days to test differentes setting, but I never obtain the result I want.
Another problem is that I overcharge my scene, now it's very slow and difficult to work. (But I just receive my new computer, I can't wait to test it )
I know next to nothing regarding Maya and mentalray (just checked a couple of pages). It looks like the material setup is relatively close to Blender internal. Namely, it seems you have a dissociation between specularity and reflection. In any case, several questions/comments:
- Outdoor scenes are a lot more demanding than indoor scenes on may different fronts. I believe outdoor scenes take more skills, and they also require higher hardware capabilities. Generally, these scenes are larger in resolution, thus more demanding in rendering resources. They require a lot of details because they need to be "filled" up to the horizon line consistently. To that end, they often require large populations of objects, particle systems, etc. Your hardware can be a big limitation. For example, last year I really was reaching the limits of the capabilities of my old laptop with the
indoor scene of Aerith house (I actually couldn't even render it). There is absolutely no chance I could have made a decent job on the outdoor scene of the Sector 5 slums with an outdated hardware. My advice would be to put the outdoor scene on hold for now, focus on finishing the indoor scene, maybe start another indoor scene at Costa del Sol, and come back to the outdoor scene once you've leveled up as a modeller and your hardware is upgraded. Thus, most of my upcoming comments will just be on the indoor scene.
- I think your priority would be to check some of the shading and rendering settings of your indoor scene. The key points are a/shadows: your objects must cast a shadow. Is the shadow blur a setting you have to tune/fake, or is it something your rendering engine can do realistically without tuning? b/indirect lighting: do you have to fake it, or can it be made realistically without tuning?
- If you do have indirect lighting available, then you would need to (unless that is already done) make all the walls in the room (including the ceiling) and make them invisible to the camera but able to play a part in the indirect lighting.
- Please try to get a good shader for your glass objects. I don't know if I can have further guidance than the classic transparency with IOR around 1.5. Your objects need to have a thickness (in case you haven't made them this way), even if the thickness of the glass object is thin (if that makes sense).
- Do you have some option to make translucency on the leaves?
- It looks like you are missing a light coming from a lamp right above the counter (there's a cone of white light on the original image).
- It looks like you tried to create an illumination around the "Beach" neon sign by inserting a point lamp next to it. Is the neon sign itself emitting any light? If not, can you have some means of doing that?
Also, as a whole: never feel like your scenes are overloaded. Sure, your computer may not like it, but it is among the aspects that will make a fair difference in the quality of your scene. The more detailed, the better. I would rather suggest you do not make compromise on the details you want to get in the scene. Your new hardware will be a blessing.
Lastly, if you want to have some modelling discussion in French, I have no problem with that (it's my native language as well) - I'd rather do it via PM though. Oh and by the way, I know that cmh175 is learning Maya, so it'd be great if you could help each other out.