Tada! 
The Back Alley
I started this project over a year ago but ran out of time to finish it. However, I found myself with quite a lot of spare time recently – I guess that’s one upside of being unemployed 
One extra fun aspect of this project was to figure out how to use the Cloth Modifier in 3ds Max to place the fabric on the wooden poles. I really like this modifier; very advance yet easy to get started with
I’m currently stuck with my laptop with only 2GB of RAM thus I wasn’t able to render the whole scene in one go, with all the displacement going on. Hence I had to break up the rendering into different passes with each building separated. I then composited it all together using Eyeon Fusion. Blimey, pre-multiplied alpha can be a real bitch! I had to delve deeper into this, and experiment with ways of getting around those ugly dark or white halos. So far I’ve made steps forward but I sense there is much more to discover on this, somewhat, confusing subject – but I’m always keen to learn 
Cheers mates!
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Here are some WIP post:
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 1
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 2
This is cool, you got to see this! The pain of endless render times will soon be history. Companies around the world is working hard to develop the future of rendering. And that is GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) accelerated real-time rendering of ray traced photorealistic renderings! So instead of waiting two hours, you just have to wait two seconds, for a rendered result on your screen. As I mentioned there are quite a few companies working on this kind of technology out there, and here are some of them.
Shaderlight (ArtVPS)
http://www.artvps.com/content/shaderlight/what-is-shaderlight
V-Ray RT (Chaos Group)
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html
V-Ray has one solution that is already available I think. Check out this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2009; V-Ray RT GPU Rendering Demo
iray (mental images)
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
mental images and nVidia joins forces to create a real-time renderer using the mental ray and CUDA (wiki) technology. It will be available in mental ray 3.8 and the current version (3ds max 2010) is 3.7 so perhaps the next release of 3ds max (sometime mid-2010, perhaps) will include the iray renderer, wouldn’t that be awesome! 
RealityServer (mental images & nVidia)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/realityserver.html
This is cool, nVidia is developing a server-side real-time rendering solution for web 3d. It utilizes the iray technology from mental images and renders the scene on a server and the image is then sent to all the client computers, all within just seconds! Check out a video presentation here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2009/12/nvidia-realityserver-30-now-shipping.html
Now wasn’t this really good news!
Cheers mates!
Autodesk has posted their Masterclasses from 2009 for free over at The Area. Just sign up (it’s free) and enjoy some tips and tricks from real masters of Autodesk softwares; including 3ds max, Maya, Mudbox, Softimage (nope, it is not called XSI any more), Motion Builder and mental ray. Here is the link; http://area.autodesk.com/masterclasses.
I personally find these two classes to be very interesting, in 3ds max:
Non-Photorealistic Rendering Techniques in Autodesk® 3ds Max® with Gary M. Davis
Giant Robots: Using mental ray shaders to integrate CG elements into real shots with Håkan “Master Zap” Andersson (Swedish guy! )
And I think I have a look at this one as well, its in Maya:
Fracture: procedural, collision event-driven destruction with Kevin Mannens (I do like destruction )
I’ll have a look at the Mudbox class as well if I got the time.
Cheerio!