What do I need?

[mib2berlin]

Yes, it does, some color for the park bench e.g.
And the border in front needs a little work.

Cheers, mib

[hmk]

Yes, it does, some color for the park bench e.g.And the border in front needs a little work.

Thank you, I finished working on it and will upload a camera animation later today.

[kubo]

In my opinion, architectural visualization and reality don't usually go along, what I mean is that reality is more dirty, random, and generally more "imperfect", your road is too clean and "new", the shurbs are to neat cutted, the buidlings are too perfect, the urban furniture is too "basic" and you can see sharp edges, there is no randomness in the picture, the little details are the things that our eyes first look for when in need to speculate if we are seeing the "real thing" or just a representation of it. This is not bad, because in the other hand, usually and Architect won't be pleased if you add any of that to his/her building, generally speaking in architectural visualization you try to create an "ideal" view of the future building, hence pretty far away for how it will really look like.
I like the images, and the last ones are much better, I think they are good if they are aimed to show the future development, but if reallity is your goal they need a little more effort.
Just my 2 cents.

[hmk]

Here is a video of the output of this scene after modifying it with respect to the comments I got here and some readings about basic photography facts.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jILnAuWVEcE&feature=channel[/youtube]

hat I mean is that reality is more dirty, random, and generally more "imperfect", your road is too clean and "new"

You are absolutely right, I am working on that. Your valuable comments/advices are always appreciated By the way, I am trying to use your method of alpha pass to add some characters, cars to the scene, and I am facing some problems. Hope I will be able to solve them.

[radiance]

nice work.
we could definately use some architectural walkthrough videos for our gallery.
If anyone wants to make a nice , long one,. i'll be happy to put it in our site gallery.

Radiance

[kubo]

that looks promising! really nice.
On account of the alpha map, I find that if you have lots of materials it's faster to have 2 different scenes, your regular one, and for the "alpha" one you assign your black materials ( just changing the diffuse color to black and leaving any opacity maps as is) in your host modeller and exporting an individual obj (actually you just need the mlt file, hint to those awesome scripters out there ) then either you batch script your renders, doing a reload for the alpha pass, or manually reload in octane with the "alpha" mesh using a white enviroment with a value above 1 (it depends but I usually go around 15 to 20).
Comenting is easy, doing it is actually the hard (and fun) job
Cheers

[hmk]

using a white enviroment with a value above 1 (it depends but I usually go around 15 to 20).

Problem is with daylight system I get blueish sky with the alpha objects, and using texture env. is not an option because it the shadows will not be as i want them to be. Any ideas?

[hmk]

Those are the 2 alphas I rendered:

Shadows are good but Blue sky is visible

Shadows are bad because of over exposing to get rid of the blue sky

Beauty Render

Blended with first alpha in photo shop with some manual editing to get rid of the blue sky

What do you think? how should I go?

[kubo]

well, I see the problem, well the "alpha" trick was intended for background removal, in your case you'll need 2 passes, first one should be the standard all black with white enviroment for background, then an extra one with skylight for the correct shadows where your car (in your case) should be all diffuse black, and the matte objects, aka the rest all diffuse white, balance the sun power to not get too overexposed shadows and blend both pictures to take the sky off.
Hope this quick example helps

[hmk]

Great Idea, I will try it right away