Well, this will be my entry, there is some things I would change, but I'm afraid I won't have more time, you can follow the whole process from first sketches to final images in the wip forum
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2144. I have to thank everyone that gave encouragement and specially all who took the time to give advice, thanks to all.
A small temple, free-for-all, from atheist to jedi followers. I've done the project just for the contest, cause I'm afraid I get the kicks out it (yeap, something wrong in my head, but I can't help it), then I modeled it in autocad and max with some shy additions from sculptris, textures are from the free resources forum heavily modified to suit my needs, and HDRI also from a link in same forum, you can see detail credits in the wip, finally the magic was done in octane.
The final pictures come in two flavors the interior ones are just de-fireflied using the despeckled tool in photoshop then I played a little with saturation, the exterior ones de-fireflied, resized and saturation corrected.
Hope you like them
edit: Well, finally it seems I've had to down sized the interior ones too, 22mb images were a bit oversized to upload, interior shots are 3600x3600 and have been downsized to 2000x2000, exterior ones were around 3000x3000 and were downsized to 1500x1500
Edit2: render time vary between 3 to 4 hours at 3600x3600 for 2048 maxsamples, at 1024 look more or less the same, but since I left them overnight didn't notice till next day so I could have halfed those times.