Learning blender is complicated and time consuming
While time consuming, the steep learning curve was eventually rewarding (yet exhausting)
Behavioral differences between Cycles and Lightwave
Cycles, that is the renderer used by blender behaves differently as compared to our renderer, lightwave. Due to this it was difficult to modify certain assets like the plants used in our scene.
Issues with Blender exporter
The Blender exporter lacks support for most shader nodes, because of which we had to manually fix certain assets. Due to this, our assets are divided into those we could fix and those we could not.
Hardware Issues
Even though we owned one of the best hardwares of 2014, it is old. Due to this, we faced issues with crashing of softwares.
Controllable tone mapping on a dark scene
Since our rendered scene is already on the darker side, our postprocessing tool, tone mapping did not work perfectly with the usual extended Reinhard, and had to use a more sophisticated method which allowed to reduce the intensity of tone mapping. Either way, we learned that our postprocessing should have been more planned, as implementing a simple bloom would have added more value than tone mapping.