It's hard to work when a customer gives you not enough information about project and defines just an output quality. Then the work takes a lot of time.
Start with a small scene and shoot it like a photographer, remember the composition - it considerably changes the image perception.
Lot of my inspiration comes from various architectural websites. All the time I try to keep up with the latest projects and news in area of architecture and engineering.
Maybe the biggest difficulty when I was starting was to achieve the correct lighting in terms of images and eliminating the flickering in frames sequences, in terms of animation.