Ok guys! The way I rendered this frame was a bit simple. If anything that I've learned so far is that simplicity goes a long way. The hard part is making it believable for the public to say "Oh Yeah! it looks like it's flying." The whole scene is rendered using Mental Ray with Final Gather. Final Gather acts as a real world lighting without you creating any lights! In the whole scene there aren't any lights! Final gather calculates bounce light, reflenctions, specularity and direct light. It achieves a realistic look, the render time takes longer but the results are awesome. I then used an HDRI (High Dynamy Range Image) image on the and applied it to a box which of course I turned the visibility and cast and recieve shadows off. THe box is around the plane and it's only effecting the plane. HDRI images are what people usually use to create does cool reflections on cars. You can read more about HDRI at www.debevec.org It's what the movie and gaming industry uses. The whole sky is a big sphere with a ramp, it covers the clouds and airplane. I then created a 3d container and created some clouds. There are some really cool example clouds in the visor window. Take a look at them and disect them to find out how they work. Hope this helps.