**Post Updated 08/26/2012 I never ended up posting the final results of this project in 2010 when I came back to it and finished it and I recently found the files. The top two images were the most recent renders done in 2010, one with depth of field and one without. Enjoy!**
Wow. This is a testament to what a few hours of revisiting a past project can develop into. Since I turned this in for a grade I have learned about something called mental ray. For people who know 3D/ Maya, it would sound stupid in a professional environment to admit to not knowing what mental ray is. Mental Ray enables realistic light gathering and shadow formations on objects in a scene. For this scene I set the ray tracing to production quality and turned on both global illumination and final gather. I also re-textured everything with a mental ray material. I deleted a couple of lights and added some. Last but not least, I spent some time re-modeling the champagne glasses using the EP curve tool and added the balcony to give more realistic depth and prevent the cramped feeling I had before. Sometimes its better off not showing reference photos with the scene for this kind of a project but for once I feel like my render is closer to the real pic then the one I turned in for the class project.
