WIP: space gunship, no.8

In my last submission, I said that the ship's hallway was "mostly complete". That was, of course, a total lie, since I always seem to find new ways to expand upon details with my models, and totally destroy any hopes of meeting my self-imposed deadlines for said projects.

I also have a confession to make. Up until yesterday, I have had no damn clue what I was doing with rendering with ambient occlusion in Maya. I would always use a sort of ass-backwards method with selecting the objects in the scene and putting them in a render layer with occlusion... which would work, but granted me little in the way of tweaking of the advanced settings. Then, last night, I discovered the magics of adding mental ray occlusion directly to the ambient value for a texture, and suddenly everything was more awesome. Now I can render lights with raytracing and non-basic textures and everything AND do occlusion! ...I feel like an idiot for not finding this sooner.

As usual, this is still a WIP... there's small things here and there that are in need of tweaking in this shot. Also, I hid the column closest to the camera so that the new details weren't hidden by it.

As usual, for those who are interested:
-program: Maya 2008 Unlimited
-render took 10 min 21 sec with ambient occlusion, global illumination, caustics, and raytraced shadows from all light sources
-10 total light sources, all area lights, with a minor glow added on the actual "light" object's texture for added effect