Transformers – lighting and rendering

Hi,
Hope I got the corect sub-forum to post this.
I have been searching for discussions and information about how the lighting and rendering was done for those robots in PRman. All information I can find is more about 8K reflection map shot on set (not sure if it’s HDR pano), 30+ hours render time of each frame, and the rendering was done in a hybrid of mental ray and PRman.

I am wondering if there is specific technique to deal with those heavy hard-surface geometries, especially they are photorealistic shiny car-bots needing raytraced reflection, maybe?

Was image-based lighting used in PRman for this? If yes, how?
How did PRman address specular and glossy reflecitons? (brute-force ray tracing? environmental mapping? both?)
I saw displacement was used in the making of on DVD. But for subtle scratches/grooves on the surface, did they use bump map (or normal map?) or still displacement map?
Were those shaders custom Renderman shaders coded by ILM shader writer?
Is the approach (passes, compositing) completely different from the way they made Davy Jones? (Hard-surface vs. creature)

I will be very grateful if anyone can contribute some information.

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