Render tests

One of the main lessons learnt during this course has been never, ever underestimate rendering and, as you would do with buying a car or choosing a partner, TEST before jumping into the big deal. Actually, be more paranoid regarding Mental Ray and test all the time, in every scene, since you don't want to spend ages in rendering just to realize, days of cripple-rendering computer after, that the result came all wrong, so render your scene in the smallest resolution you can first.
I took the easiest of all the shots to do some testing, playing with Mental Ray settings and so on, which took me ages but finally could figure out a nice set of parameters that left me satisfied. 

There is not much going on, just a shot of the back of our main character while some light & shadows are cast in there. So here: 

Idea is to give the impression that the day is starting. This scene looks like a train passed by or rather, by the vertical direction, fell off from the roof to the abyss. Is not what was intended so has to be changed. I did that by shortening the moving distance of the spotlight. 

Slightly better, but still too fast. Gives the impression of a speed camera shot and this would clash with the rest of the scene's tempo.  

Since I felt the previous scene was quite flat and boring, I added some camera rotation.

This time the tempo and movement is perfect... just a small thing: we want for the scene being about the robot "waking up", which we will state by turning on the... "on"... button. Yeah. It would stand out more if we place it completely in the shadow, so here we go:

Ta Da!  

(some Final Gathering adjustments so it looks less dark & voilá!)