More visualisation progress - neearly rendering!

I think I have now finished modelling my interior scene and have been working on lighting for the last day or so, trying to achieve a simple 'morning light' type atmosphere. It won't be anything too special for now, as I plan to learn more about this in my research project next year, and I have limited rendering times to consider.

For instance, I do want to use at least one volume light to add more depth into my scene, but once one or more of these effects are added, the render times practically double or treble, so I might leave it for now and hope it still looks okay. I have also decided against using photometric and Mental Ray lights for the project, for similar reasons, and I feel slightly more confident using the standard lights at the moment.

Anyway, here are a couple of renders of the lighting situation at the moment in my scene, which I think will be pretty similar to the final product:

I have used quite bright lights from all of the windows, but made one side (the right windows) emit more of an orange, intense light, to try and achieve a similar tone and intensity of morning light. I realise I could have used an accurate daylight system for the location, but I do not feel very confident with this technique, and did not want massive render times, again. The more I look at the renders, I think that having the strong light and shadows on both sides of the room does look quite strange, but I will mess around with this more before I render it. Because I have higher windows, this also limits the shadows on the ground, but I think this is quite realistic so will leave this as it is. I have also tried to get shadows from the exposed wooden planks on the end wall, but did not want to make this too prominent in my scene, so made it more of a subtle effect.

Now, as well as finished off and tweaking the lighting set up (flickering fire light, colour alteration, etc.), I need to create my camera(s) and place/animate them to create a walkthrough effect. I must admit, the idea of filling up 60 seconds, with what is quite a small interior space, sounds quite hard with just one walkthrough camera. Therefore, I have looked at one of my preferred visualisation companies' portfolios and videos, and have found some examples of using a combination of a general walkthrough camera (slow moving around the space) and fading into more close-up shots of different aspects within the space. This video shows this technique quite well: