Just thought I would share my main work in progress. Plan is to create this as an animation walkthrough of the house, as well as a few still life pictures. Loads of work to do yet, but thought I would post up the basics of the house first. I wanted to create an project that forced me to organise a LOT of parts into collections.
(Yes I know I have forgot the chimneys)
Looking good, can’t wait to see the progress of this one.
I’ve wanted to do something along these lines for a while. I’ve been to chicken to start something that big as of yet though, lol. Looks like a great start.
Thanks both, getting decent plans of a house really helped a lot. I’ll share as I start detailing the rooms - getting decent references for the interiors may be more problematic. Biggest issue to date is that there is a lot of details out of sight in the pictures
Very cool house
This is really cool Silver. Definitely going to have a lot of collections here haha. Kind of reminds me of The Sims
Duuude! That’s crazy stuff there! As we would say in Greece “χαρά στο κουράγιο σου” which roughly translates to “bless your courage/patience”
The end result will be jaw-dropping I’m certain!
Done a few test renders - started with HDR, but it didn't produce enough light for the interiors. Replaced with large area lights (300W) against the windows, although they are still noisy. For completeness I added the HDR version of the image just because its so pretty :)
Interestingly, camera seems very large even though the house is to scale. I had to set a very short focal length to get wide shots of the rooms but has caused some distortion, especially in the kitchen (longer room).
Dang! Coming along nicely there!
Wow - thanks for the progress pics - this would look good next to my shed 
Nice
Just as an experiment, I did the same render with HDRI and portals (the dark one) and with area lights outside the windows (the brighter one)
Using portals is meant to reduce noise, but i didn’t think it made much difference. Also set sampling to “manual” and “none”, but both resulted in a very similar render.
In my experience Portals seem more effective with actual sun lamps rather than HDRI. My experience is rather limited though.
Have your seen the Blender Guru video ‘The Secret Ingrediant to Photorealism’? It a good video and what he suggests makes sense. I never got around to try it but will someday. Might make a difference.
Nice. I like the one on the right although more noisy and kind of darker. One on left is good too
will give me something to do tonight then - will let you know how i get on 
I thought that ‘portals’ are more a way to reduce render times and not fireflies (white spots). Portals let the renderer knows where HDRi image maps are of influence.
Good Video on photorealism @eladd, surprising how big a difference playing with the colour management settings made. Check out a few test renders. To be honest, still not clear what the modes actually mean. Note Filmic is now default in blender (2.8.x).
View transform settings as follows:
Image 1: Filmic with medium contrast
Image 2: Filmic default (Darkest image)
Image 3: Filmic log (Brightest/washed out image)
Been a busy few weeks with work and home, but with a little spare time getting the overall internal lighting better and starting to flesh out the kitchen a bit. Biggest problem is my plan of animating a walk though has ended since this static render took 2 hours 17 mins!
Image rendered at 1000 samples and de-noised.
Is it necessary to have 1000 samples, when using de-noising? Maybe 200 is enough.
Did you optimize the tile size under performance. It will help to find out what the best size is for your current project.
Also you could render the animation first in “Workbench” mode, the third mode besides Cycles, and Eevee. Only in low size 640x480 (or lower), Just to see and test how your animation works.
And also remember an animation does need that much sharpness as in a still. So some quick test runs could give some insight in this animation topic. The codecs for video, adds also some form of degradation.
