The key light is a slightly amber area light shrunk down and set a distance away from the ship, parented and targeted to a null in the center of the scene. Whenever I change the angle of the camera, I can grab that null and spin it around to point the light where I want it. The ambient fill is a gradient scene backdrop, set to 100% brightness at the top and bottom and about 50% in the middle, colored a low saturation blue on top, amber on the bottom, with a higher-saturation blue and amber in the middle. Render settings (which may only mean something to Lightwave users) are PLD 7-pass antialiasing with a classic reconstruction filter, radiosity with Final Gather enabled using one bounce and 48 ray samples. Render times for the ~450,000 poly mesh are anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes, depending on how much of the model in in-frame, on a dual-core 2.8 GHz Intel Mac using multithreading.
Post-processingwise, I save the raw images out as 32-bit TIFFs, then bring them into Photoshop where I curve adjust for brightness; a duplicate of the base image is curved down to crush the shadows and bring out the brights, then blurred with a Gaussian blur setting of 3.5 pixels and set on screen at 50% opacity to give the bloom effect. The backdrop is a radial gradient mixing black with a low-saturation, low brightness blue, then given noise and the "Blur More" filter. I recently started playing around with color adjusting the base image under the bloom layer, which is left the same colors as it came out of Lightwave. I think it adds some depth to the images.
Which is probably more than you needed to know.
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