Rendered stills from the first two briefs

I've been meaning to upload the images from the first two briefs a while now and have finally got round to doing it.  I felt the first two briefs were challenging because it's the first class I've ever taken in 3D and I wasn't used to having to complete scenes to deadlines, what made it more difficult was that both briefs were given to use at the same time and from concept to completion, we had six weeks to complete both.

The first brief was environmental modelling - we had to design a 3D environment and we given the following choices to base our scene around: futuristic, historical, industrial, natural or luxurious.  After some consideration I ended up choosing to model a Chinese lakeside pavillion scene which incorporated elements of history, nature and luxury.  I chose to use 3ds Max to do the scene, extensively using the knew Substance textures included in the 2012 edition, along with creating my own materials (the green stone) from procedural maps and using textures sourced from CGTexture.com.  A single 1080p frame took approximately 23 minutes to render.

The second brief was interior modelling and we had to design a table scene for a film or stage production.  It was a very open brief which I liked and I knew early on that I wanted to create a Western bar scene because of the rich history around Western films, the characters in them and the fact that the bar scene is often significant in the film.  I chose to use Maya to complete this brief which I had never used before and at times found difficult to use: the absences of layers when modelling was frustrating early on (even though Maya has History, I didn't find it as intuitive), initially I found UV mapping difficult, however I quickly learned how to use Maya's powerful Unwrap feature which, although I like, isn't as good as Max's Pelt mapping.  The biggest challenge was using Hypershade, specifically connecting nodes to the correct channel in a material is very unintuitive (but this will be solved with the release of Maya 2013), an example of this was with my lighting, I used a daylight system as my primary light source which gave me good results, but I could only adjust the exposure and gain on the default camera because I was unable to connect the exposure node to cameras in my scene correctly (definately something I'll have to learn how to do!).  A single 720p frame took 2 hours and 15 minutes to render...  And I have a powerful computer... (only the first three renders are 720p, the others are at a lower resolution of 850 x 400).