The Sci-fi lab is a banner that I made to showcase the Nvidia Iray Renderer,  MDL ( Material Definition Language) and Nvidia vMaterial catalog . The final result was compiled from LPE renders. LPEs stand for Light Path Expressions,which allow users to select exactly what items that they  want to isolate from a scene by isolating rays of light.  Light Path expressions are a lot like render passes except a lot more flexible because you can isolate very particular areas of your scene and you don't really need multi mattes as a result.  One of the coolest functions of light path expressions is that they calculate all the light that hit or pass through an object meaning that they will also isolate the caustics, making liquid and glass color changes a breeze. 

I modeled most items in the scene, textured, lit, rendered and composited it using Maya, Substance Designer, Iray and Photoshop. This scene was later used in the background of a  demo Scene created using Mental Ray.