Have you got a before image we can compare it with?

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

I'm not sure what you mean?. They asked me to make an exterior still using a random cad mesh from a model library. I modelled the surrounding environment and placed tree storm plants everywhere, adjusted all the textures modelled the driveway and flower beds and the fences around the units, textured everything, made a scatter grass object and used the Vue render from the other picture for the hills in the distance. I rendered the middle ground separately at double res to get some extra detail and also separated the glass in an extra pass. The people are poser models also rendered separately.

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I thought they might have handed you an untextured scene so we could see the "before and after" results. I think the scale of the people might be a bit large, as are the trees behind the building. Either that or the building is too small.
Are ivolve into more realstic "dirty" scenes, or do they like everything nice and clean? (a.k.a. unrealistic) In my opinion it looks to clean, but I know those architectural places don't tend to like too much dirt.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

You're right about the people, the foreground gutter area is like four times too big, I only realised after I'd modelled it because I had everything else hidden, I should have scaled up the building and re-rendered the passes, I still might before I hand it in. As for the lack of grunge, these places don't like dirty buildings or even dirty gutters, I think they may even like dirt free garden beds, Still I used a bit of grunge here and there just very subtley.
Theres a real aesthetic for bright GI and very flat materials focusing more on the way the light shades the scene instead of on all that great specular, bump and grunge mapping.
partly because they want scenes to render faster so they can offer a client an animation at the same quality and partly because its advertising the "product".
As a side note, next time you are rendering a scene and things are looking a bit dark and gloomy, instead of turning up your GI and light intensity try saving the image to openexr format and load it up in either cs2 or cs3. It will be automatically gamma corrected with a 32 bit range. you can then adjust the lighting in photoshop using the adjustments>exposure tool. Its an great way to work keeping your lighting options open and Gi tends to look better when you up the gamma. You can also turn up the gamma in Max using the colour mapping roll out in vray render settings. 1.5 or even 2.0 look good.

Also, heres an update, I'm too lazy to scale up the building, I think its probably just ok now regarding scale, still a bit off though. and I found a nice Fiat on the net, had to re do all the materials (they were done with Brazil) and they were all labeled in french, yahoo babelfish came in handy for that.

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That looks better. I'm not a big fan of the flat clean look, but you've pulled it off well. I guess when you're looking for quick renders all those extra layers of dirt and specularity can really slow things down.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Yes, agreed. Not to mention taking longer to set-up and test. I think these guys are real vray purists no standard materials even. I always end up using things like mutilayer and orennayer blinn but I think vray can be many times quicker if you make everything with vray materials.

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Yeh, the documentation I've read says that vray will render vray materials quicker than equvilent standard materials.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]