Before rendering I placed simple (Light) in the scene, to cast some shadows.
For rendering I used Mental Ray.
For illumination I used only GI, without Photometric lighting.
Other than that, rendering settings was pretty basic – not not worth mentioning.

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In mind of post processing I rendered multiple passes: Beauty pass, AO pass, Z-depth pass and pass for glowing digits.

Beauty pass.

Ambient Occlusion pass.

Z-depth pass

Glow pass.

For Glowing pass I used Materia ID pass and rendered only Nixie tube base and digits.

Scene was rendered on 4.0ghz. i7 CPU with 6gb. of RAM.
Total render time for all passes in 720p resolution was around 110 hours.

For compositing purposes I used Autodesk Composite.
Usually I like to composite images in photoshop, but because I had to composite image sequence, I had to use Composite.

So, the composition: At first I overlaid AO pas over Beauty pass, by using “Blend & Comp” node.
And after that I did some minor color corrections with “CC Histo” node.
Then I added “Glow” node. To make glow affect only digits, I used Mask, that I “Extract”ed from Material ID pass.

In the end I added lens vignetting effect, to make the video a bit more realistic.

After That I was ready to render final image sequence.

After rendering final image sequence I had to convert it to .avi video format with sound. For that I used program called VirtualDub.

And that is pretty much it.
I hope you liked this article and maybe you was able to extract something useful from it.