At RPA a lot of our work was the website configurator assets. I created and implemented this Maya/ Vray workflow.
Rendered all the food groups separate; car base, chrome, wheels, lights, windows, paint. Paint was created with Vray Blend material of 5 different vray materials each with a corresponding Material Select Render Element that got used in Nuke to rebuild the paint. Each light got rendered separately so at any angle I could mask off just the reflection layer of any given light or boost metallic flake of another light etc. Massive amount of control in Nuke which was necessary for demanding and fast changing art direction calls throughought the project.
Maya set up was a little complex; lots of render layers and vray object property overrides and keyframed hdrs for lighting. To render everything faster we opted for HDR Light Studio. I created a render layer in Maya for each light, and created a Vray light dome for each light that had layer overrides. Each light dome had a layered shader texture which in itself housed 8 different hdr files, each keyframed to the correct frame. So each frame would turn on the correct hdr and each render layer would turn on the correct light. It was a little complicated but it worked and render times wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
Final look for the top trim, there were a total of 3 trims plus accessories for this car.
This is the final nuke comp with all three trims, a tree for each trim.