FinalGathering of the Grumman Duck
 

I have taken an ill these days and battle sore a throat and some light tiredness.

So I did a rendering with mental ray today (because I don't care doing much of anything):

This is of course not perfect, but I stumbled upon some issues.

1) I'm not sure how to give the scene an overall apt lighting.
2) Choise of shaders greatly affect the dirstribution of light it seems. I turned some chrome objects into lambert-white to tune the intensity down.
3) Although this pic is far from finished/optimal. I think I have come about a strategy in deciding how to mix min-/max-radius values with FG-rays. I guess it is first imporant to figure out an appropritate min-/max rad setting, and doing so with a LOW amount of FG rays. Finding a proper amount of FG rays, is the next concern, and I think that I don't rally need any high amount of FG rays for my scnene.

The scene was lit by a hdr image, in the incandescence value of a shader, and placed on a cylinder around the airplane.

FG rays = 1000
Min-/max Radius = 1 and 1 I think.
(It was supposed to be 1 and 10, but I typed them as 10 and 1, making mr set both to 1 and 1 automaticly.

Made in previewFinalGather quality mode in mentalray.
Sampling was "triangle" with filter width/height 2x2, and min-/max sampling of 1 and 2.

I'll do some investigating about a better/worse the min-/max rad setting.

But I just wanted to show you guys my cute little airplane.

EDIT:
Render time = 30+ minutes ( not too bad :) )

your hdr image on the cylinder is not primary visible? or is it that boring blue thing? it looks like you only have one point light in the scene (behind the plane) and combined gi and fg. or maybe you need the diffuse of the cylinder/plane is not set correctly? maybe something other than lambert, that has a tiny bit reflection would help.

Yes, the cylinder in not primary visible. The blue is the camera's background-color.

There are no light's in the scene but I know from the hdr image, that the light doesn't evenly light the scene.

Yes a lot of things would help I recon BabyDuck.

Primarily I wonder how to make the hdr image darker. I can lower the lighting produced from that file, but I can't make it get real dark.

oh, if the floor was wider the diffuse-lighting would improve/be more realistic.

it is just how it looked like. as you dont even need final gather to light it like you had - global illumination and a point light and sphere for sky could do that. no offence meant. but why use the car if you could walk faster and cheaper?
dont tweak only the lighting of the file. that wont be right. as hdr defines with what f-stop and time you made the picture. if you have one made at daylight, a hdr image at night will be completely differant. but you can adjust the brightness in maya. i figured that you need to make the incalandecence very very very low. just dont use the slider, but go to the color of the incalandecence. set your color model to HSV (more accurate if it comes to intensity). leave hue and saturation at 0 - but "higher" the V (value) to about 0.05. that is a good start to play with the setting. you see it is virtually impossible to place the slider that exact. and from there you need to play with the value (again, dont trust the slider). at least that worked for a hdr image when i played with it.