Since our last industry critique, I have not had much time to work on the thesis paper or start the 3D animatic as I have been pretty busy with classes and finals coming up in three weeks.
For my lighting and rendering 2 class I am using one of our scenes to test out and render with Mental Ray. This has been quite a task. I used Mental Ray's physical sun and sky for our Dan project to render the Donkey in its various surroundings. i want to use the same for lighting the scene for the L&R 2 class. Mental Ray shader networks are fairly complex and require a lot of R&D. I will be combining this with Maya's shading networks too.

Here is an example of lighting a scene using Mental Rays physical sun and sky