This is one shot of a spot that my company did as an internal project to display our abilities in other areas other than character work. I modeled, lit, textured, shaded, rendered, and composited this shot. This shot was about a week and a half turnaround. I didn’t get a chance to get some of the imperfections and grunge/dust that I wanted to, but I’m still fairly happy with the outcome.
I didn’t use an hdr at all for this. I instead used 5 area lights that were visible and connected with portal lights to light the scenes. I also had a spot light casting GI photons in combination with fg. Maya and Mental Ray was used to render with.