Shiny

I made a teapot.  There were some reasonably challenging parts of the model, but because it would feature a lot of shiny and reflective surfaces, I went to a higher level of detail and poly count than is usually necessary for this type of model.  I'm satisfied with how it looks rendered in a fairly plain studio environment, though I still feel even at this point the black material of the pot will need more tweaking to get just right.

Some Sample Furniture Asset Renders

Here's some first-stage renders for some of the furniture pieces I've been working on - So far, even with low-res texture maps they're coming out very well I think.  I'm surprised at how reasonably convincing they are, even at this low-res stage.

Terrain Test

While working on some rocks for MediaLab, I decided to do some research into how other people have created rocky environments that are both quick to make and to render - I found one method that uses an asteroid generator script at http://vray.info/tutorials/vrayrocks/default.asp and did a quick test. 

To make the scene only took about 10 minutes, and render time was just under an hour.  There's still some geo tearing from the displacement but the method centers around using a combination of bump and displacement maps to generate the rocky surface.  It's a technique I applied to the rocks I was working on, and even on a smaller scale like lawn decorations it produces a good, convincing result.

Final Flat layout

I followed some design cues from the site concepts to help tie them together, but it still follows the earlier design.

Site Layout design

 I've created a site layout - I'm keeping the clean style of the logo + card and flat concepts but have added a sun-yellow color to break up the otherwise dull greyscale.