I used Mental Ray as the rendering engine. To light the scene I used just one skylight and 5 other Max standard lights (4 omni and 1 target spot light). You can see my settings in Fig.08.

I usually keep my render settings simple, so for this scene I only enabled Final Gather in the indirect illumination tab. I also used HDRI maps for extra light in the scene. Once happy, I simply hit render … But then a problem occurred: I didn't have enough memory to render the whole scene. To be able to do this I had to decrease the size of the textures using bitmap proxy. Usually reducing the texture size is not a good option if you have close-up shots, but for this scene, since the camera wasn’t going to be too close to the character, the textures would still hold up for the render (Fig.09).

The whole scene was rendered in 3 passes, which was the raw render, the ambient occlusion pass, and the ZDepth pass (Fig.10).

I composited the passes in Photoshop, and also re-painted the hair and added some more details and effects. Here is my final image of Odin in his throne room (Fig.11a – d).