I usually think of some emotional theme even for my architectural visuals, sometimes related to old memories.
I’ve always had this gloomy image of an hotel in the early morning, when you usually leave for your flight. The city still dormant but with some sign of life here and there like a passing car..

My personal challenge is not creating the most realistic looking image possible, but create a piece of work capable of conveying atmosphere, familiarity and a visceral sense of place.

Lately I’ve been using exclusively Redshift for my renders. It’s extremely fast and reliable, but my personal conclusion is that i can’t get the same level of detail and realism as a CPU based render like Vray. This Is not necessarily bad, the final images can be still artistically rich and interesting if you know what you’re doing. Realism is not everything! In my case, i did the best i could considering my time was limited. Some details could have definitely been better, but i had to compromise. Nothing really special in my workflow: Modeled and textured in 3ds max, used Polygon Textures, Forest pack+Laubwerk for the vegetation and marvelous for the soft parts. I’ve designed and modeled most major interior assets like the Couch, bed, Tables, kitchen ecc.Some color adjustments in photoshop. The exterior scenes are fully CGI.