Gene,
we could met, Francavilla is not so far from Ancona (my town) a couple of hour of car/train. next summer, OK?
now, technicals.
i used A:M for Nicole , of course, and the whole scene, the piano, the microphone and the curtain.
i have tried to use Rhino to model the microphone, and i did it (10 min), but when imported the mic in A:M i had a disaster of spline, when imported as a prop, i cannot have a good geometry, peaks here and there and no way to fix them.
so i remodeled it in A:M tryng to do the cuts with booleans but it takes too time to render, and the edges were too sharp.
i tryed to model the cuts phisically finding manually all the intersections, also to give to the edges some bevel, this drove me crazy
at this point i applied a transparence map to the body of the mic and here we go. it's not perfect but, that's it.
i used Silo to try to fix some polygon of the mic model from Rhino... i gave up.
BTW: i'm a mechanical designer
some images of the Rhino modeled mic vs. the A:M modeled mic.
bye... Vincenzo