Finals Finals Finals

Oh my god finals are due next week and I am going out of my mind trying to juggle work, finals, and Christmas shopping before I leave for India.
The thesis paper is also coming along and we submit our first draft tomorrow. This paper feels like it is never ending, there is so much to write and yet so much to exclude. I have never ever written a thesis paper in the MLA format before and this is going to be a task.
So far we have close to 70 pages but this includes our visual script and additional images.

Lighting and Rendering Final

Working with mental ray is not turning out as easy as I thought it would the shading networks are pretty complicated and there are 10 different ways to do things that will optimize the scene and the render times.
Working on this final has made me realize even more that I would surely use Mental Ray as a renderer, most of my shading networks will be created using Maya's shading network. I plan to do a lot more research into mental Ray for Maya over the Winter Break, and depending on that I will decide on the amount of my usage of Mental Ray for the thesis.
The shot I was using for this classes final involves the amulet and the sword, so I have built both of them and the models are looking pretty good. Here is a occlusion render of the amulet. This same design will also be on the sword.