Rendering 0.2 - Basic Lighting Setup

After doing some research and tutorials it was time to actually start doing some work on my assignment scene. It took a little while to get to where I am now, but I have almost clear understanding how it all works, at least about final gathering, global illumination and shaders. I really like how little things can affect the whole scene and the colours, its pretty cool.

Global illumination was fairly straight forward, nothing crazy about it once I figured out number of photones and all that. After playing around I eventually settled for this:

Render time: 0:19
Objects: Floor and walls
Lights: 1
Photones Intensity: 3,000,000
Gloal Photones: 50,000
Radius: 15

My first problem first Final Gathering was that it was making the scene way too dark for some reason. After looking around for solution I began to change the photon colour bounced from the floor and walls to something much lighter, which helped to brighten the scene. Also adjusting accuracy of final gather and using Radius Quality Control helped. Not sure if its best practice but so far I am setting the RQC max to 10% of the scene size units and min to 1% of it, so in my case it was 46 and 4.6, the scene or at least the main room is around 460 units. Below are some results of trying around different settings and position for the photon emitter light.

At the last picture I do like the "sun" reflection in the window, which I might revisit later, but there will be big ass tree in front of the windows so shouldn't worry about them too much. I have also took down diffuse of the windows frame for photons which made them much less shiny. I might turn it off or make it bit more less later but as I said, they wont be probably visible with all the objects. This is the final image for today:

Render time: 2:18
Objects: Floor and walls
Lights: 1
Photones Intensity: 4,000,000
Gloal Photones: 50,000
Radius: 15
Final Gather accuracy: 250
Radius Quality Control: Max 46, Min 4.6

And for the end, I changed the wall material a little and used spheres for my tests. In the scene there is no bump for the walls yet, not sure I need one. I am happiest about the wood material so far, I really like how it looks in the scene, especially on the floor. I like the marble too so far but will see how it will look in the scene itself.