Hi!
A few comments from me as well .. yes, the 3D girl coming out of the robot was supposed to be shot for real, but then the time ran away and we had to do her digital in a short amount of time and not on a Hollywood budget. Inititally we planned to shoot everything for real - but then the girl was not allowed to be in the military area at all, so we could not shoot her for real in the talking scenes in the end, which is a shame because there was no real need to make a compositing shot out of them. So on the next day we recreated the light on a parking lot and filmed her in front of bluescreen - which ate up too much time, so we had to move to the kitchen before the actress had to leave and the location would be closed at a certain point as well .. that´s why the girl is CG.
Only in two shots the TG terrain rendered in Full-HD were composited with hires textures from 3dsmax, in all the other shots it´s "raw" TG from Hannes, which mostly needed only very little color correction to look good.
The worst thing about the production was the fact that there is no realtime representation of 3d clouds in the viewport and (even worse) no possibility to export dummies from these 3d clouds to 3dsmax - if we would have had some sort of geometry dummy that would represent the area where the volumetrics would be rendered later we could´ve animated the plane more precisely flying through them etc., so all of this was trial and error until a point where we said "no time anymore, hit render!". Beside that TG was terrific - and using our new rendermanager "RoyalRender" rendering animations was easier than ever before.
Glad you liked the commercial - just tell me if there are more questions, I´ll happily answer.
cheers,
Steffen