A Study in Blender and Cycles for archvis

I’m a 3D generalist, but have many requests for “photo real” archvis projects. This was practice for one of these projects. I’m new to archvis in general, and work entirely within Blender and Cycles. I’m looking for helpful feedback, or Blender specific tips to take my work to a new level of realism. I’m not convinced I’m quite there yet, as this render looks to be lacking that secret touch, and I’m not sure what that might be.

Doña Oliva Apartment

My first “big” commercial project. I was responsible for designing an apartment at a reasonable price with a contemporary feel to it. It was quite an interesting experience to work on a project where I had to stick to the requirements of my client and limit almost all my ideas. I had to keep it relatively low cost and minimalistic which meant that I couldn’t even use different wall colors, had to stick to tiles on the floor etc.

When it comes to the technical aspect of the project, I mainly used an HDRI for lighting. To reduce render times I also used ambient occlusion. Render times varied from 3-4 hours.

Tennessee House

The house was made with Archipack, the grass is Graswald, the people are from mrcutout.com, and some of the random objects like the lanterns and the flag were from 3DSky.

Rendering was done in Cycles and most postpro was done in Blender’s compositor.

Göteborg apartment

This one was laying in my hard disk unfinished for quite some time now.
It’s inspired by an existing apartment in Göteborg, Sweden modified to my taste and needs.
I used a lot of free (as far as I can remember) props from around the net.
The rest I modeled them myself.

My intention was to produce a more warm, pleasant and familiar look, something that feels more homelike and not a perfectly designed space, that will felt somehow “stiff” and set, like the ones you meet a lot in the design magazines and some architectural renders.
I even tried to make some deliberate shooting “mistakes” to give a touch of “amateurism”.

Blender, Cycles, Filmic Blender (Always and forever).
40min/image on CPU+GPU(GTX 1060).
Post production done in my favourite software for still images Darktable