1st Rendering Help

[Olic]

Hi everyone, this is my first post

 

I am a second year architect in Lincoln Uni and have just finished the last piece of work i needed to hand in. It was incidently my first go at visualising a proper image in 3dsmax (Before I used sketchup). I am quite happy with the end result, but i think i could add some additional realism to it but im not sure how. If anyone has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated, thank you

 

I am using 3ds max 9, Mental ray 3.5 renderer, arch&Vis materials with ambient occlusion enabled (i think), Final Gather, Global Illumination, caustics, logarithmic exposure control (External daylight checked for external renders), Mr Physical sky and evironment, Mr sun the model is built in 3d cad and is assigned materials per layer

 

I was reading on hdri but i cant understand how to make it work with max9, mental ray with multiple arch and vis materials

 

Any advidce would be greatly appreciated

 

Photos at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/OliverChinn/Model

[trino]

The lighting does not look that bad at all, i think what you need is some furniture, some trees, etc, something to give more life to the image, in the interiors i see some splotchiness, you have to increase your settings, i think the new Mental Ray have some presets you can use to produce a high quality image, try them for the interiors.