This is one of my earliest Maya renders, no editing software used. I used a Maya physical sun and sky, and square lights in front of the windows. All these give off a small amount of photons to create bouncing lights. The stairs and glass are a dielectric materials, because i liked the way it looked on the stairs. Maybe i should have gone for a real glass look for the windows. Lighting a maya scene is not one of my strong points, but i am really happy on how the light of the upper windows fall on the ground. The best thing i like in this scene are the tiles, and the light glass reflection from the painting (and windows).
Looking back at this render now I am still quite proud of it. Although I have never done interior renders before this one wasn't that bad at all! I remember how much time it took to fully setup the scene and model the house. This must have been 4 years back. Also this was rendered with Mental Ray and now I have so much experience using V-Ray (which is perfect for architectual visualization). Maybe in the future I'll go back into this scene and render it again, just to change the lighting bacause that could be improved dramatically and add some compositing to it. If I do redo it I think I will try to remodel the house and render in with Houdini's Mantra. Just to get more knowledge out of Mantra.