We fiddled with settings in maya, disabling final gathering, the results were unsatisfactory. Areas in shadow were far too dark. We played around with various light setups to try and simulate the effect of final gather (the bouncing of light from surrounding objects). The results were an improvement, however the final gather renders appeared far more realistic.
We then decided to fiddle with the mental ray sun preset to greate a global illumination effect. Originally the scene appeared over exposed due to the Vue sky and the Maya exposure and sky reacting with eachother.
We removed the maya sky node from the mental ray sun/sky setup to leave us with just the exposure and sunlight nodes. The results were surprising! The areas of the scene which were cast in shadow would usually appear very dark without the final gather option. By using MR sun and exposure in conjunction with the Vue scene we managed to lighten these areas, when comparing the final gather renders with these, there was not much difference, however the render time per frame went from 20 minutes down to 2-3 minutes!
I have also animated the characters for one of the scenes which features the skulls. Heres a playblast... and heres a screenshot from the render in progress... its at 6 mins per frame with final gather... due to arrive in 2.4 days!
