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This is a design I did for a small intimate restaurant in San Jose, CA. The owner sold the restaurant before doing the remodel, bought a very large restaurant, and went broke. He loved the design but made some bad choices.
I worked extensively with mental ray to get the bounced light to agree with photometric measurements and photos I did at a similar restaurant in Los Angeles. Mental ray is more complex than Vray but I found I get better results with final gathering and global illumination for my idea of how light should reflect and bounce around.
I use old Spanish doors on the right as optional privacy dividers.
There is a bar at the far end, a bad location, but there were no other options for the budget and size of the space.
It may appear dark on some monitors but the lighting is calibrated to reality on a calibrated monitor. I had photos of the L.A. restaurant that I compared to the rendering. The lighting is designed to bounce off the tablecloth and illuminate the faces of people with a certain level that smooths skin and helps people look great. Since I don't have humans in the setting this can't be seen.
I should mention that my wife and I setup our laptop in the L.A. restaurant, Smeraldi's before it was recently remodeled, and downloaded photos we took of the interior to Photoshop. From PS we used the curves, etc to calibrate Max, and then rendered this model and calibrated visually to what we observed around us. We worked for at least an hour during the early evening in a full restaurant and no one asked what we were doing. In Silicon Valley, Northern California, techies would have been all over us.
