Pool Deck

This module from the Architecture Academy, introduces EIS lighting.  I had not used this before and it is a really powerful way of creating realistic light patterns from lamps in a scene.  Blender has an add-on to import EIS files from lighting manufacturers,  detailed in this Blender Artists thread.

 Another painful lesson is the amount of additional rendering time needed in dark scenes to get rid of noise.  The image below is still noticably noisy in areas,  yet was rendering for a whopping 3,000 cycles over 10 hours to get this far.  The long render time partially due to despite turning down all the subsurf levels on the furniture to zero,  the scene was still too heavy to fit within my GPU memory and  needed to be rendered using CPU.

On composition,  I tried to use lines within the wall art on each side of the upper floor to bring the eye to the middle bottom and then a defocussed fern in the foreground to guide over to the lillies.