sci-fi pod scene_render_complete

Finished rendering my first production quality project. Everything in the scene was modeled, rigged, textured, and animated by Cinque Cashell. With help from the pluralsight course Introduction to maya 2017 I was able to build a production quality sci-fi scene from scratch. The background which is a photo imported into the scene and the foreground which was provided in the lesson files for the pluralsight course introduction to maya 2017, are the only assets within the scene not built from the ground up. I was responsible for building, rigging, texturing and animating the ship. As well as creating the dynamic dust and lighting effects. I started with a simple cube, extruded some surfaces, added a few edge loops and transformed some vertexes. Then I created two more cubes and did the same for the arms. I then duplicated the 2 arms to the other side and created some engine fans and vents out of yet more cubes. The retractable arm is nurbs but other than that everything on the ship is made from polygons. I rigged the arms with a simple rotation, and gave the retractable arm its own control curve attached to a series of spline IK joints, which is what allows me to animate the claw arm in all directions. The claw itself was also given a control curve, however like the arms themselves the claw has only limited movement. The ships geometry is grouped to yet another control curve that can rotate and transform in any axis. I imported the panels texture that you see on the ship from the lesson files in the pluralsight course I used to guide me through the creation of this scene. It is a repeatable texture and therefore a good choice to use as an outer skin. The dark metal and shiny metals along with the dirt on the fan blades were created using ai textures found within the hypershade in maya. The dust effects were created using fluid emmiters in maya. Changing the turbulence, emission rate, step size and opacity gives me the light see through dust you see the ship kicking up throughout the scene. Its also worth noting this is what makes render times go from 1 minute a frame to one hour per frame...so use these effects sparingly unless you got lots of time to kill >< Finally the lighting is comprised of a directional light to mimic the sun angled to cast shadows at the same angle as the background pic. Then a skydome was created and given effects within the hypershade to mimic the color of the overcast sky in the background...The whole thing took 4 days to render at an AA sampling rate of 6/2/2/2/2/0 and a step size of 10 for each fluid emmiter.