AAA visual quality for architectural environments

Good day everybody,
I have been developing architectural walkthrough projects with unity for a while now (about 1.5 years), and would like to push the quality of my work higher.
As far as my workflow goes, i'm pretty satisfied with the quality of my models (made in 3ds max), but would like to push the visual quality of the unity part higher. The first areas that come to my mind i would like to improve are lightning and shaders, but i know there is much more involved in reaching a high visual quality, such as deffered vs forward rendering, linear vs gamma, post effects, AO, and so much more. So i would like basically discuss with you about the different methods, as i know there is no 1 correct answer for these questions, to try and build together a AAA visual quality architectural walkthrough framework in unity.
some points i would like to stress about my intentions, first is that currently i'm focusing only on the windows platform, and efficiency is less important then quality. secondly i have some money to spend on assets for this goal, and i would like to purchase the right assets that would fit together and compliment each other to create a coherent framework. and also, i would like to make this frame work be compatible with the oculus rift, so that is also a consideration. and, last but not least, i am interested in both interior and exterior scenes.

the idea is to create a general framework you can use on any model and it looks great, and again i know there is no one size fits all solution, but i believe such a framework can be built as something you start with and later specifically fine tune it to fit the current project. and of course i intend to later share whatever methods i come by with everyone

so, after this long introduction, for the ones that stayed with me , i would like to focus the thread around the following questions:
to achieve the highest visual quality with unity you:
*Use forward or deffered renedering path? (for both interior scenes and exterior)
*Use Linear space or gamma? (for both interior scenes and exterior)
*what lighting scheme do you use, and do you use any assets? GI? area lights? HDRI? (interior and exterior)
*dynamic/static lighting? do you bake your models beforehand in your modeling software (for me 3ds max and vray)
*what shaders do you use, unity standards, or any assets? physically based shaders? shader-forge custom shaders? skyshop? alloy? allegorithmic substances?
*what post effects do you use? AO? bloom? Amplify Color? anything else?
*do you use skyboxes, parametric skies, or any other asset?
*any other special tricks and tips to make your project beautiful?

Thanks everybody, and lets hope we have a fruitful discussion.

 

The guys at RedFrame get some pretty amazing results. It's worth exploring their blog to get some insight to the questions you have

http://redframe-game.com/blog/

 

I think PBR shaders + reflections and GI would make the biggest impact. Unity 5 cannot get here fast enough.

 

Well if the OP can't wait, there is LUX and Candella SSRR about.

 

If you don't want to wait for Unity 5, I'd suggest picking up one of the existing PBR solutions. Use linear lighting and deferred rendering. Use an HDR enabled camera, and post effects should include.a tone mapper, bloom, antialiasing, and AO. I believe that the off the shelf PBR solutions will provide a good HDR reflections from a skybox, but you still won't get good quality local reflections from this setup.

 

Great, thanks for your replys, so what do you say about the following settings:
Using Linear space, deffered rendering and an HDR camera with post-effects.
also using the following assets:
*Alloy for the shaders.
*Skyshop for the lighting.
*Candela SSRR for reflections

anything i'm missing? will all this assets work well together? what about GI?
any other tips?