15 days of irregular work, putting it in "work hours" it'd be like 40 or 50. Rendertime was 2 hours, post editing 1 hour.
If you click on my DA profile (
http://ere4s3r.deviantart.com/ ) in my last journal you can find a link to the "scraps" where i posted all the Work-in-progress images. All 19 of them (amongst others)
As for the contrast/darkness in the center, tis true... sadly one has to find a balance and in this case, it was already too bright on my screens. Can't wait for OLED screens to become prevalent because that'd fix these issues