I had a very simple Lighting setup, the base is a Skydome with a sunset/night map on it and all the other lights are rectangle light.
The hdri used was very blue and it makes the final render also blue. For this, instead of correcting directly the hdri, I decided to correct it in post production. The positioning of the brightest point directly in front of the camera was to make the clouds contrast in the water reflection, giving a very nice atmosphere on the image.
The rectangle lights on the first level of the museum are placed as seen in the pictures of the place so they give this nice effect on the side walls. All other lights are a simple big rectangle near the ceiling of every floor, facing down.
One big element, although in doesn’t have a big presence is the painting inside the showroom. I knew my camera was going to be far so I wanted to pick only one painting but big. The first one that came to mind was the Guernica, by Picasso, and so it remained.
All the vegetation was spreaded using the plugin Forest Pack that makes this process very fast.
As for render settings, I chose a very simple light cache with brute force from v-ray. This offers an amazing image quality and detail, although it took me 8 hours+ to render, the amout of noise was not so big and the reflections were perfect. Ready for post production.