Mirror! Mirror! on the wall

This was done as a part of RnD on the rayswitch shader and traceset in Arnold for maya. I saw this blender render which had this illusion of a chess pawn seeing himself as a king in the mirror and it kept me thinking about achieving the same result in a single layer without any compositing. Apart from the technical challenge, the image itself felt something special in terms of the story it conveys. It was really an inspirational concept. So I did some research on how I can achieve it inside Maya with Arnold render. The challenge was to keep both the pawn and king in the same position yet not cast any interactive shadows or indirect bounces onto one another. If I turn off the cast shadow of the objects, or turn off specular reflections, I wouldn't get any shadow on the floor or the reflection on the mirror. So that's how I got to the idea of using rayswitch shader with aitraceset node to remove indirect and shadows from objects. Everything went smooth as expected except the traceSet didn't work for the subsurface scattering. I had to remove the SSS from the chess pieces for the final render. But that part is yet to figure out for myself. I didn't completely follow the reference in terms of its composition or colors. I felt in the reference the subjects and the floor were competing for attention as both were in the same level of luminance almost. Then I made the camera angle to be more close to the ground level and increased the scale of the king to be more huge. I was trying to convey the heaviness of someone's dreams or aspirations. And also I made the king a bit more royal by giving it a tine of gold in his color. The lighting was kept similar to the reference. Overall work was done in an overnight. Used Maya and Arnold for rendering and Nuke for compositing. Downloaded the 3d chess piece models from sketchfab and HDRI from polyhaven.com. This project was more about figuring out a way to render the image in a single layer so I haven't focused much on lookdev or lighting. I was planning this for my next tutorial as there isn't much available on the rayswitch topic. I hope you like the artwork!! Let me know what you guys think in the comments