This was a lighting challenge that I did for Jeremy Birn’s CGTalk Lighting Challenge #19. I modeled and textured all the pieces before lighting the scene. This image was picked as one of the few to make it onto Jeremy’s website gallery.
This was my first try at making Gems and Gold with Mental Ray. I had a lot of fun making procedural shaders for 90% of the assets in the render. This was a single render pass with film grain and highlights added in Photoshop.