OLD
When I used to light scenes I would just chuck global illumination and/or final gather at it and see what sticks - the result was an image as shown above. This image took about a minute to render and didn't look too bad at the time. Below it is my latest work on the scene.
NEW
Quite a large difference I would say. Over the course of this year I have learned so much about lighting and virtual lenses in maya - this not only vastly improved render quality but also dramatically reduced render times. The shot above only took 35seconds to render at production resolution. A big shout out to Rey is deserved for his fantastic texture work with this scene and his model, also to Luke for his character modelling.
Video:
I have not yet animated the secondary on the characters.....giblets, I will leave this until later. I am also still working on the lighting as I animate and am making the scene much brighter - for some reason when I uploaded this video to this post it came out VERY dark. As you can see behind the character everything is black, this wont be the case when we render it properly.
