I would second what FrankieV said, especially on the scaling. It pays to work in real world scale as most systems (i.e. physics, lighting, etc) can produce very tough problems if you model out of scale by a factor of more than 3 or so.
Another thing:
I come from the VFX/Film industry and was used to that kind of workflow, but I must say game creation is quite different. In film we had render times of up to 80 hours per frame (on a high-end farm) to achieve this great look. Games do not only need to look good but do that in real-time (preferably at staggeringly high frame rates ;). For me, that meant that I had to learn a lot about efficient use of resources and optimizing every asset I use in engine. An nice example is to use the RGB channels of a texture not to represent one thing (the texture or color) but three different things that just use luminance values to save on the number of textures you need to have in engine.
That’s actually what I really like about working with game engines, you have to be creative in how you do things 
Cheers,
Michael