Touching up the scene - Hypershade, lamberts and blinns / Render settings

In designing the environment/backdrop for my maya render, i wanted to experiment and make use of different settings within the hyper-shade menu. ie Different blinns, lamberts, textures.... Playing with attributes such as Ray-tracing, incandescence, reflectivity, refraction translucence.... But most importantly, different lighting and camera positions.
This was the most fun part of the animation. I think this is the most akin to music software such as ableton of Logic that maya gets. Really feels like your modulating a signal, or playing with effects. Basically experimentation with settings is the only way to go about it. Direct results, checking the render view, both in maya software mode and ray-trace mode, to make sure everything was in order.

To begin with, the reflectivity and the incandescence of the turquoise walls was far to high. In the render window it completely blew everything out to a white glow. This was also due to the Directional lighting being too bright. To solve this, i decided to go with an ambient light from the top left of the screen, at about 0.5 brightness, so there was just enough light to allow for shadows and clear reflectivity. For this i used a lambert with high reflectivity.

I really like the texture on the floor and the reflection that is kicked off it. This was hard to get looking right. I wasn't planning on it looking how it does now. Keeping continuity within concept meant that originally i was going for greys and metallic colours. But when these were applied, the animations looked dull and lifeless. The experimentation with colour then commenced. There is no reason for any of the background of floor looking the way it does. Just trial and error till i found something that i liked, then tweaked for effect.

Rendering out meant going into a bit more detail. Detail that i had forgotten from last year but is imperative for the animations to be right, especially in taking them into after effects.
The animations were rendered as lossless JPGs, with the file output being set to; name.number.extension...
Care taken over setting the right frame padding - whatever the last frame is at (eg 150f) that would need a frame padding of 3. or for 25f it would need a frame padding of 2 and so on)
Lastly it required a batch render of images and then importing int after effects for composing and rendering into a quicktime movie format.