I will post the 100 in your interesting thread 
, thanks a lot my friend, but…
what are you waiting, you must register now 
hahahahh.
Hope to see you soon.
Keeps posting
Nice work…cool poses.
rendered in Maya with Mental Ray and using a Photon setting of 50,000 and raytracing maxed out.
I’m curious. It doesn’t look like you have any global illumination or raytracing in your scene at all. I don’t see one thing that is reflective or reflecting, or one Photon. Why crank them up so high if you aren’t using the feature?
Not flaming at all, just trying to understand 
Hey Meats,
Pleasure to hear from you, Huge fan of your work…
I’m still experimenting with Maya rendering
guess I’m doing it wrong. I’m going for that nice even diffuse look using global illumination rendering with Mentalray. Any advice Meats???
Thanks odhinn -
Yeah. As far as reflectivity goes, you need to make sure that materials in your scene are reflective. Not all materials are, such as the Lambert that you are using. A material such as a blinn or Phong are great for reflective objects. The Raytrace settngs in the render globals dictate how many times a reflection will bounce back and reflect a relfection of a reflection. A value of 1 or two will usually surfice unless you are dealing with a “hall of mirrors” effect. Anything over 1 will slow down the render, so don’t abuse it.
As far as Global Illumination goes, in Mentalray - make sure that global illumination is turned on. You really only need one light, the photons from that light will bounce around the scene and give natural lighting. All of the things that you need to do would take me years to type out, so I suggest a few searches on Cgtalk in the Maya Mental Ray section. I don’t want to be a cheesy salesman, but I just watched the Gnomon Mental Ray: fundamentals and global illumination disks by Matt Hartle and they really helped me out to understand the things that were confusing me.
Here is an easy way to start you out with the look that I think you might be going for:
Turn off or hide all the lights in your scene.
Turn off the default light in the render globals.
In the attribute editor of your camera, adjust the background color (located in Environment) to something dark grey. This will be your overall scene light.
Turn on Final Gather in the render globals.
Adjust Final Gather rays - start with something like 256 and work your way up until you like what you see.
Render with mental ray.
Hope it helps, keep up the great work!
Meats,
Thanx for taking the time out of your busy day to lend me a hand, it’s appreciated.
nice maya render!
Thanx Vivien:)
did some armour today and a quick render…
Nice concept there, but the feet need more detail IMHO, a few pipes etc, at the moment they dont do the rest of the image justice… but it is still a W.I.P so I’ll shut up now
very nice this last one !!
maybe the skin is too saturate.
BTW very good 
small_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond Nice post steroid athlete modification 
I think the textures and materials play together. Cmon, bring it to the next level!
Cheers
LemonNado
Thought you MAYA users might find this of some use.
If you hate sewing your UV maps together especially if you use the automatic mapping function I found that bodypaint 3d will let you isolate certain polygons and generate a uv map only from those you have selected. If you like to render in mentalray this will enable you to use features like projection master with zero pixelation. I am posting an example for you to see from Maya. Excuse the topology I know it sucks.
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[[attach=14759]DISPLAC_uvmap.jpg[/attach]]
[[attach=14758]DISPLAC_pic2.jpg[/attach]]
Fast Maya Mentalray render with UV map done in BodyPaint 3d…
Mentalray render with displacements
TIME: 3 minutes
POSTWORK: blurred background PhotoShop CS2
]
very nice those semi robot legs…
Gooooood render, my friend. Can you put an small tutorial for make the displacements in maya (yes, i know there is a million of tuts here and in da web) but anyway…
Keep posting Saint Odhinn
Buckie,
thanks… still tons to do and right now detail is not one of them. Working on texture tests with Mentalray and trying to solve the issues with UVmaps.
Drummer,
thank you… the creature was once human but that was a long time ago,so the skin is dry and damaged.
Pinkarman,
thanks…
I am so in awe of the work and talent posted here on a daily basis that you have no idea how much it means when you guys take the time to respond to my thread.
Ilusiondigital,
thanks my friend…
I posted some answers to uv setups and displacements on Ralf’s “Ikarus” thread. I will try and post something for you this weekend. Mentalray is great but very fussy about settings in Maya. Sometimes cranking up the wrong output setting will either cause a crash or a one hour render. If you want to know the truth about displacements in Maya it really lies in a well laid out uv map. The topology of this latest piece I did is really,really bad(lol). So me spending time on further renders is kind of pointless but I’m just using it as an experiment.
Displacements love those well laid out GUV files in ZBRUSH2 but I can’t seem to paint with them in Bodypaint.
If someone knows a way around this please let me know:)
An artist who used to post here “SUNIT” knows a ton about displacements and mentalray renders but he seems to have vanished. I learned alot from him regarding this topic.
You’re right about what you said regarding tutorials on Maya and displacements there seem to be lots of them out there and not many good ones. I am trying to un-tangle some of this through trial and error and just plain old research.Thanks for telling me you like the w.i.p. pics I post as I often wonder if people want to see these experiments before a completed render.
I am glad to share results with you all because of the giving nature of all you great artists who make up this forum.
Thanks or your time, my friend. And thanks for show your wip and your workflow
Started from scratch even with textures in Zbrush.
The Maya render for those interested has a “ramp”
used in the hypershade attached to the diffuse setting.
The ramp goes from white to a light gray causing even distribution of light. You really can’t get the effect as well without the ramp.
i also tested sharpening the displacement map in Photoshop with success before using it in Maya.
While still in Photoshop remember in your color management to turn the “perserve embedded colours” to off.
If you don’t your map will not render properly.
Laid out my uv map in Bodypaint as per usual. There are no lights in this render only he default lighting.
I am quite happy with the clarity of the displac -map in this third render test.