Hi,

well as for tiling, you'll grow an extra sense for it when you render more often as it's one of the most nagging things to overcome. In this case an option would be to just select a random brick in PS and copy, paste, scale and skew it on various fitting places. Do so with some more bricks, and the pattern gets randomized pretty quickly.

As for lighting, i'd suggest picking up some readingmaterial in the photography-department. Lighting is there a more obvious subject than to some books on digital art that focus more on modelling or materialising (plenty exceptions though), and you'll quickly learn some basics.

Even given your background that is only loosely related, i think you did an awesome job on the whole project. Really, my compliments.

One more thing i noticed, is that the walls of the boating club suffer from a thing called moire. The patterns start displaying these parabolic lines. I'm not sure how you can overcome this with Podium as i have no experience with it, but most often this dissapears with a higher rendering quality. I see some 'spots' in the sky as well, wich are also a sign of low quality rendering so just up-up-up the Anti-Aliasing, image size and whatever other feature you can tick on and you probably will get a lot better result.

Hi, my first post here but i'll give you my 2 cts.

first of all, if this is your first sketchup project and rendering, this is nothing short of amazing imo. I take it you must have some pretty elaborate experience with other modelling-programs prior to this, no? If not, i'll call you neo from this point on

just some minor remarks:

-i think you could do the trees on the background a bit darker, to bring more depth in the picture. Perhaps add a little more contrast as well, it seems a bit flat right now.

-the bricks used in the garden still have a noticable tiling-effect. Certainly not as bad as it can be, but with a little-postprocess in photoshop you can improve on this i'm sure

-work a bit more on the lighting in the interior-scene. Light is a great tool for giving atmosphere, focuspoints and depth to a render. Use that to your advantage. I'd also would think the same for the outside-pics, although i find it hard to tell given the daylight-situation.

-In the interior-scene, the roses outside that work great in the outdoor-scene reveil their low-polygon count from up close. Almost rectangular-leaves or smthing. Try improving this in Photoshop i think.

That about it i guess. A question. What did you model, and what did you import in this scene. Just a ballpark. Congrats, though, although the renders are a bit too 'romantic'for my personal taste, i think you did a very good job