Tom,
Good thought about the specular value. What is your number derived from? I agree about the candles' reflectivity and had done a few version where I played with UV roughness. I got a nice waxy finish by throwing an all white jpg into the Glossy Map parameter and dialing the strength. Unfortunately, I thought the image looked a little dull in comparison to the one I started rendering (which was posted here). Here's an example:
Olivier,
<shudder> 40 hours on a 1.5GHz. Admittedly I left the process low for much of it, but I don't use the machine for much except taping net radio so, you could say it was about 30 hours of focused rendering. Each emitter is a small elongated cube (so six faces) emitting 1 watt. Film speed is 50 ISO at f1, which is about what I would expect for this kind of lighting.
Oscar,
It looks like andronikos916 thought the file was Max, not Maya, so how's about this: I'm taking delivery of a dual 2.7 G5 later next week. I'll set this off with Tom's specular suggestions at a higher res and maybe it'll be useful for your marketing?
Finally, does anyone know the scalar of the emitter faces vs render times? If I double the complexity of the candles, will render time double?
Thanks for the kind comments, folks.