This is an older one, created back in August 2004. This image was originally posted at mydeviantART.com account, and there it had become a local phenomenon. Ever since then, it has been seen by over 300,000 people, and has been ripped internationally hundreds of time s for advertising agencies, media companies, pretty much anything you can think of. This is the image that got me on the map. Just look up Technical Imperfection on google and you'll see all the people who have ripped this image of mine! Oh the joy of internet fame.

Technical Details

Rendered in Mental Ray 3.3.1, created in Maya 6.0.1. 24 hours and 3 minutes render time on a dual Opteron 250 machine. Custom written physically based shaders for the glass and liquid (similar to dielectric), DGS material used for the metal. The syringes were modeled with NURBS and also polygons. The dude was modeled with Maya subdivision surfaces then converted to polygons. The eyes are simply nurbs spheres with adjusted CV points.

Lighting was done with 2 very large mental ray area lights on either side combined with physical_light shaders and both caustics and global illumination. Area light samples were at 10x10. Minimum adaptive samples at 2, max at 4... which makes each pixel lit with an area light cast somewhere between 1600 and 25600 shadow rays (well, its not exactly like that, but err, who cares?).

On the right you can see screenshots from the viewports, and below you can see the original sketch created by Delya