Here is a slightly better render.

I wish someone would post how they make those really cool looking global illumination renders.

I don't understand how to use mental ray. I paid like $199 dollars to buy the alias learning vid and I learned nothing! The guy talked for like 4 hour and it was like sitting through a quantum physics class. I learned all there is to know about light but nothing about how to use the features of mental ray.

Even when the guy did give an example it was like okay lets set this value slider that only goes to 1000 manually to 80billion, then turn all the lights off in the scene, oh except for this one which I will set to some arbitrary value....

and it went on and on. I forced myself to watch it like 5 times and it just seemed like he randomly picked values for the 15 thousand options in the mental ray render tab. There was no ryhme no reason no patterns to follow.

I turned on global illumination and jacked every knob and twiddled every slider and put ridiculous values that I just pulled out of my ass into all the boxes and the render looks no different then a plain "production render".

So this is about the best I can manage. default final gather settings with 3 lights and a point light for backfill.

The model is just under 10,000 polys but I did not really try hard to optimize it. There are tons of hidden faces I did not bother to clean up as I was in a hurry to get to the rigging and skinning point.

cheers,