Some tests made with Ambient Occlusion (set very light to avoid noisy image)
Comments are welcome
Enjoy
The furniture is very nicely modelled, no doubt about that.
But the rendering is…well…very computer-like.
Is that what you want? If so - great.
If not…well…then you need to work with lights a LOT more.
So far as I can tell, your ligthing is lacking in “volume” …meaning that
the contrasts are unnatural for the real world. Nothing ever gets to be
that “concentrated” between black and white.
I´d work more with Area-lights + soft lights if I where you.
Try it…you´ll get awesome results if you play around with it.
GL.
/T
what do you mean? just set the saples to 10 or higher to avoid noise.
nice scene,i agree with JoOngle,work some more with lights.
AO isn’t good for in door.
AO is basically shooting lights from inside a halfsphere over the entire scene, so you won’t get much if any light hitting objects on the inside of your scene, thus it’s either very dark, or you simply don’t have any shadows.
This is an ambitious scene, a lot of work being apparent. Very nice modeling and general layout.
In addition to the other observations mentioned I would suggest increasing the OSA (oversampling) samples to help cut down on the sharp edges for things like the walls, shelves, and cabinet.
The pillow on the green is interestingly done, almost very real and believable, but, given the near perfect condition of the rest of the scene, there’s a possibility this item might garner more attention from a viewer than you might have wanted.
If you are open to de-emphasizing it, you could try smoothing it out (in mesh edit mode W KEY -> Smooth) a few times, or you could replace it with a more geometrically regular shape, possibly even one matching the same material as the chair. If, on the other hand, you wanted to draw attention to the pillow, then it works perfectly as is 
The tables are uniquely shaped. The glass material on them was admirably done.
In the second image there’s a purple thing near the top/center/towards the right that seems to stick out. It also draws attention to some mesh problems in the background just above the drapes, to the left.
With the proper lighting and some tweaked materials this could become more realistic looking yet, if that is your intent.
Keep up the good work!
RobertT
Thanks for your comments, I am agree with you, I will try to get an ambient light giving the scene a more soft result.
Thanks for your comments, I use AO to get a more homogeneous result and more realistic shadows, but that’s true that it induces a more complex light work that I did not control as I would like. I will investigate another way.
Thanks for your constuctive critics, as I expected, there is some more work …
Looks very nice!
If you’re using AO for an indoor scene, the AO effect is very little. You have to open up your scene so it resembles a film set, rather than a realistic room… so basically, you only have a corner of room which the camera is focused on.
To be honest, I haven’t tried soft shadows or area lights, but I’m sure they can help with the realism of your scene.
These are the kind of scenes that beg for yafray actually, photons would work wonders here (and of course take a lot of time to set up and to render )
Right, I am agree with you, but I tried to rend the scene with Yafray, first of all a lot of things like lights, transparent elements should be modified to be well used with Yafray and the time for the rendering so huge, after several trials and many hours of suspense, I finaly decided to find another solution, but I probably come back to Yafray.
You can use AO. Think like a studio photographer. I used to do portraits and merchandise photography.
You can set up “Flash” lighting. Use large white planes with 100% emmitance (Emit = 100%). Set these behid the camera and angle them correctly to reflect the light. Also play around with the distance for the AO, for reflection (light particle bounce distance, etc…).
It will take time, but will work.
I agree with everybody else, the lighting does need to be worked on. One thing I found interesting was that the couch on the far right (the one that is half cut out of the scene) is shiny on the sharp edges. Either turn the spec. down or smoothen out the edges. I also think it needs a more rough material… It appears to be very smooth. On the other hand, the chair with the green pillow on it is fantastic. Work on the lighting and this could be close to photorealistic.
Very good suggestion. AO is a great tool, but it usually needs some help for best results 
BTW, this very same technique of using a white plane was said to be used to counter radiosity problems experienced while creating Blue Sky’s “Bunny” short film. It definitely works
RobertT
It does not seem to me that ambient occlusion would be very useful here. Far from wanting the light to be “softly coming in from everywhere,” you want to have some very specific directional light to make this scene work. I suggest that you light this scene conventionally, and carefully.
For the basic “exposure of the film,” a few lamps or area lights will do very nicely. You need to make sure that every area has adequate exposure and that none of the film is “blown out.” In other words, at all times you must observe and control the range of contrast throughout the shot. A conventional photographer would say, “set your Zone-5, then look for your Zone-3 through Zone-7 areas.” (Ansel Adams’ zone-system.)
In the studio we’d do this with softboxes, and maybe some translucent scrims to tone-down the light where we want the dimmer areas to be. We are not, at this point, dealing with either the practical-shadows or the practical-lights.
The “features” of the shot are the various objects that are arranged in it… the photograph (which BTW reflects too-much from the glass tabletop, although the idea of having a reflection is a good one)… the pillow… the chest. Your eye is going to discover each of these objects in turn and briefly study them. (I don’t think it’s a good idea to have another chest partly-visible in the other room.)
Each of these features needs to have carefully arranged shadows. It cannot have the “multiple shadows” that they have now. A shadow-only spotlight, possible only in the digital realm, is an elegant solution to this sort of problem.
Here I will quote something from Glen Moyes’ excellent new post on “learning 3D”: Shadows in nature are usually the complementary color of whatever the light source is. In other words, shadows are not black. So, if the shadow is substantial and prominent in the picture, as in the case of the shadow cast by the mantelpiece, you must not only darken it, but splash a little color into it. And if the area receives light from two directions (see my comment later about having an off-screen window in this room), you must splash two different colors into it.
The lamp is a practical-light. Like all such lamps, it gives light through the shade and a cone of light above it. Digitally, it will contain both a regular lamp and a spot. The light must be very soft. (Well, it may need two spots, for the downdraft of light. Notice right now that this downdraft is shining on the left side of the lamp but, unexplainably, not on the right side. In cases like this, the viewer might not consciously realize what is wrong, but the viewer will subconsciously know that something is wrong.
The outdoors, through the window, if portrayed, must be portrayed using an appropriate color temperature for sunlight, and the glass must not be visible except perhaps for a slight specular-highlight to define where the plane is (if there is an on-screen practical to explain where the reflection is coming from).
All of the various items in the scene must have a very carefully controlled range of reflectivity and color so that they all blend in. For instance, right now the keyhole seems to be glued-on to the chest. These show up as “hot spots” on the film. There is a very large hot-spot under the table and the two walls of the door leading into the dining room are also very hot.
The overall color temperature that has been used for the interior lighting is, in my humble and on my screen, rather excessively blue.
There is a dis-continuity in the dining room molding above the window, and nothing at all to give depth to this room. We have no visual clues to tell us how far away the back wall is from the front. Right now it looks like the entire room is the thickness of one chest… and since we can see another chest in the same picture we conclude that this dining room must be very small indeed. (Our eyes reject this disagreement, even if once again we do not immediately see why.) We need both furniture-clues and shadow-clues.
The lighting would be made more interesting if we suppose the existence of an off-screen window over-the-shoulder to our right. Now we can introduce lighting with two different color-temperatures (outdoor: sunlight; indoor: incandescent) and blend the two, all without showing the window. This will also give us a plausible reason to introduce that “outdoors” color-temperature somewhere else besides the actual outdoors-area that we see through the window, thus balancing the two. The incandescent-light of the lamp actually “feels good” as it is right now: incandescent light is quite different from sunlight and you definitely should study the two together. But having said that, the power level of the incandescent needs to be fairly subdued vis-a-vis the sun.
This scene uses a very complex lighting scheme. Choose and place the different contrast-levels (Zone-3 to Zone-7) very judiciously and purposefully. Likewise carefully select and place the two temperatures of lighting. Ambient Occlusion has no place here and becomes a waste of computer-time, since it can never do the job by itself in a scene like this (any more than I could just “stick up a soft-box overhead and call it good”). You will paint the picture using light.
The modeling is very nice with great attention to details. That cushion is very nice, as is the visible grain and wood-panel design in the chest. But the lighting needs adjustment, as does the set.