Sizzle

So here's a quick rendering I made of a fireball coming toward camera in an alleyway. Actually, it was the shot set-up and texturing that were quick, not the rendering. The rendering took a few days with the computer processing all day and all night, and running up my electric bill. Fluids devour RAM!

Tutorial on creating a carpet in Maya

http://blog.cgsutra.com/2010/06/29/maya-fur-how-to-create-carpets-using-maya-fur/

The Price

Christopher Salmon raised over $160,000 on Kickstarter to produce a CG-animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Price"...

http://www.theprice-movie.com

Star field ball made with sprites

Usually I make a star field using PaintFX, but here's a quick whack at a star field made with sprites. I didn't bother making an alpha channel with the sprite sequence (4), so it's by no means perfect, but this might be the most superior way of making a star field, especially if used with something more complicated than a nodal camera pan.

Hastily-made interior

Thought I'd try my hand at a quick interior. The frame below was rendered with Mental Ray, Global Illumination turned on, using an Area light (scaled to the size of the window) with an intensity of 0, and a photon emission of 1900. The scene is roughly the size of Maya's default grid space. A directional light with an intensity of 1 is present to illuminate the photons emitted by the Area light.