Firstly this is a WIP
I need some help in suggesting the best way to light this scene when I put the roof on it.
The image has no lights just environmental lighting without a roof
I have to place a roof which will allow no external light.
It is a very large scene with plenty polygons.
Nice work.
Like the simplicity of the people. They give scale without being distracting as “real” people usually are.
As for the lighting, perhaps you could use a large VRaylight from above and exclude the roof from it. This would form the overall lighting, but I would add some smaller, local lights to add contrast and focus to certain areas.
great image … jaw dropping … who needs a roof any how 
OMG!!!1
What a great image.
Airport terminal?
Btw, you made those ppl, or are from some package?
first of all, what kind of a roof are you going to use…that is really the question. because if its translucent…which light can pass through..there are few ways to do it..
Nice work so far, Im not to sure how to tackle your roof problem as I cant see any visible interior lights but the “people” that you are useing are FAR better IMO than the RPC types 
-dave
My guess is that the people are just planes with opacity maps. It is exactly the same as the usual way of creating plane people, but without diffuse map.
Thanks for the good comments, yes it is an airport terminal.
As for the people, they come from Sketch-up library. I exported to Max.
Just 5 people in the scene with a scatter effect around the terminal. I need them for the scale. The good thing they are very light 2-d profiles of people.
The scene is enormous as I got a whole lot of models from different people and had to compile into one model. Different packages and techniques.
I have previously used the vray light and tried to excluded objects. I find it does not always work.
The roof is solid and the interior will be lit from light on the sides, the rest iis artificial. Too many lights to creat an accurate sim.
nice work …love that floor…but I’m always a sucker for good glossies
as for the lighting:
I think the best would be as dejaVu suggested a large area light excluding the roof, but if that doesn’t work, an alternative could be sticking smaller area lights once every other subdivision (I’m talking about the beam subdivisions in the roof structure) and see if that give you general soft lighting…looks like the roof is devided in three long sections…I would stick a light into each one of those sections and then every other beam subdivision…hope that makes sense…don’t know how to explain it any better w/out drawing it 
looking foward towards more updates..
paul.
Update, Still WIP, managed to get a roof on,
C&C please
pretty nice!
how did you manage to light it all up??
I don’t like that you’re using the same three RPCs all over the place …but then again it’s just a wip…hehe
I like the glowy yellow sign panels…can you share how you did the mat for that??
nice work,
paul.
great…is getting even better.
How you made the material for the big Yellow screens?..the ones with the big letters.
EXCELLENT :shock:
nice nice image!!!..very hightech…one question is their a sun in your scene i dont see sun lightning anywhere…pppl looks nice
Very realistic, great job 8)
Are those signs suppose to have a diagonal slash across them? It kinda looks like a smoothing issue.
--Jon
I really like the look - very nice!
dean
re
Looks really good. What airport is this?
hmm…are you using some sort of fill light positioned aproximately by the camera? Or some falloff based selfillumination?
The shading looks strange as if lit by a flashlight mounted on the camera…for the white materials that is…the others look lit by the room/environment.
Even though i like a lot the material of the yellow blocks over the gray blocks, i find them to have some sort of sss which, i think that looks very nice, but… not quite fit the reality of a real material to build that kind of thing. i think that the first mat, which i dont like as much would fit better (to me) on the second scene… with a few tweaking tough… other than that there are some little artifacts on the upper right part in the roof, but, as a wip, they’ll maybe go away on the final shot… still, one of the best scenes i’ve seen in a while, congrats…
Very nice When can we expect the final rendering?
-Matt