Here is some modeling progress… I am fairly satisfied with the furniture density in the room because there will be a dim lightning setup. I rendered this while eating… where at some point a foot race challenge for shotgun in my car catapulted into something destructive! But Josh is OK! Anyway… Critiques and comments much appreciated!
…oh. I know my table is floating! It has been inflicted with curse of floating tables… But that has been fixed now. 
I love it. Looks so detailed and beautiful. I have absolutely no crits for this model. Everything seems to be in place perfectly. Maybe add a chair? Because the table looks like someone is using it intensely.
Good job 
hi there Jason … very good WIP
really impressive idea for the challenge, it should be explosive when its done:D l am very much looking forward to see it completed
im just having a doubt here … about the lighting in this scene how did u do it???
is it Amb Occ using Mental Ray???
Yes! It’s and ambient occlusion render in mental ray! Thanks for the comment! The final lighting will be very low lighting with the lamp on the desk being the main source for illumination.
I’ve recently completed some lighting tests and am done with this part of the scenes UV’s.
This part of the scene is a little less than half of the work in my shot. It’s time for textures, then fx and keyframing. Hopefully I can have this done by Tuesday! Wish me luck.
Hey man looking great. Really like your environment so far, solid modelling and lighting. Good luck with texturing and the rest of the challenge!
the lighting looks really good j-dawg, but know what it needs? some kind of “gobo” to break up the falloff of the desk lamp! 
keep at it man!
thanks for the tip Devon! I will be adding a gobo to the spot on the desk once my light setup is more final. This is just a block in of the lighting for now. I am progressing slowly with the textures and hope to have a final version of this scene by Tuesday. I will be adding some rain drops to the window and illumination to the room by lighting outside. More updates soon!
Here is my texture progress for now!
here is some more WIP. I am going to be moving on to the next part of my scene, and will come back and clean up my textures if I have time… but for now this should do! I did a little post on this one. I am going to try and get a sequence rendered out tonight.
Here is some recent work in progress. I am sad to say that I won’t be doing my original camera move through the wall and to the outside to reveal the tower. Due to time constraints I had to cut this a bit short so that I could finish in time. Anyway, the new shot involves the camera moving through the room and up to the window to reveal the tower in the distance in the middle of a storm. These images are the finals for this part of the shot, they are color corrected but are lacking depth of field and heavier post work. I have rendered out an alpha for my glass window because it is somewhat nonexistent at the moment. I will be comping the glass window on top later once I have the exterior, which will also be rendered separately and composited using the window alpha. At the moment I am waiting for renders and working on an expression for water drops randomly falling along the surface of my window.
It’s looking very nice, sad to hear your not going with the original camera move, but the new shot sounds just as good. Can’t wait to see the final!
Dude, this looks awesome! Great scene, awesome lighting! Any work to show on the exterior yet?
sadly not a lot of work on the exterior. I have the beginning of the wardenclyffe tower and some particle systems… but I will show those + explain them once they are done
Here is an update of my scene.
I feel like I’ve spent wayyyy too much time on the modeling/texturing/lighting and not nearly enough on the FX.
Anyway, I’m off to San Francisco for GDC until friday, so hopefully I get everything done by the 31st!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wSle6LfWQ0
I have the same problem. I only now start to explore ways to make FX. Wasted too much time on modeling and animation.
Your work looks great. Keep it up.
Heh, tell me about it. I’ve spent 90% of my time so far modeling/render tuning and waiting on renders because only one machine in the house can handle my scenes (the others can help on stuff like RGB & occlusion passes though).
Keep it up man, this looks great.
–T
So… I was thinking of dropping out of the contest because of all the time crunch, but… not using a computer for 3 days while at GDC gave me withdrawals! Time to get back to work and finish this up before Tuesday night!!! Wish me luck!