Blender

Just about got the whole model into blender now. The lighting has been tricky to set up for this scene. I have only applied two materials so far, the metal mesh which uses an alpha map and the translucent material for the pods above. I had to delete the metal mesh walkway from the floor above as it was creating really noisy light effects as the environment light passed through it. The render took about 50mins so I'm still going to have to look at other ways of speeding up the process. I had to increase the samples from the default 3 to 14 to reduce other noise in the image but there is still a bit of noise - this is slowing down the render significantly. I still have a lot of other materials to apply so the rendering is going to get even slower - not sure this is a very practical way of making the video as a second of animated footage is going to take a day to render...