chill - Thanks for the kind words.

1. I create a site wall, and for the ligthing I usually just use a point light (for sharp shadows) or an area light (for softer shadows) - above , behind, and to the right of the camera. I turn on ray trace shadows for the light and quadratic decay. Then I do a few partial renders (render region) around the brightest area until it is not burned out to adjust the intensity.

Then I set quality to production fine trace, and turn on final gather and then render

2. I either boolean a n sided cylinder (depends on the number of sides in the poly face(s) I am putting the hole in) or I use the n-sided cylinder as a guide and use split polygon to draw around it to cut the hole in the poly face. Use split polygon to connect up the corners and make all quads. Then add support edges to control the edge tension.

I grabbed a copy of xnormal and was going to experiment some more with normal mapping the coils. I think that will, in the end, be the best solution for rendering, but for now I have just have the model hipoly detail.