Since the previous render was a little darker with 8 minutes of render time, I decided to make a few changes to make the image a little brighter and with much less render times.
Previously, I was using the mia mental ray shader to give the translucent glass effect, which I realized happened to be the reason behind the long render times. Thus, I changed the shader to a blinn and built a shading network to give the Fresnel effect. This dramatically cut down the render time to less than half, approximately 3 min 25 sec. Also, I increased the number of lights to 16 to give more specular glints to add contrast the scene.
Then, I broke the render down into render layers to increase render efficiency. I broke down to small details such as the glass of the lamp, the wires and the main body had their own separate layers to control the specular highlights during post. In total, I ended up having a total of 12 render layers:
I set up a naming convention system within Maya so that it would categorize all my renders appropriately and so that I wouldn't have to shift over any files to other folders later on. I left it to render overnight.
When everything was rendered, I brought it into Shake to composite. I did minor color corrections on the specular highlights to make them more bluish. I also did color correction on the whole to make more contrast to the shot. Finally, I faked a rack focus (depth of field) and rendered the shot:
The shot is being uploaded to YouTube right now as I speak. Once it's done, I would put it up here. Meanwhile, comments are most welcome.
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