Finished

Here are my final renders for my abandoned school project. The things I have learned in Maya thus far: modeling using polygons and nurbs surfaces (haven't yet learned why one would use sub-div surfaces), UV mapping, texturing, creating materials and shader sets, lighting, including real world lighting, HDR image based lighting (not used in this project) and volumetric lighting, aaaand rendering in mental ray. I can't wait to learn more! Oh and btw the tree was modeled in speed tree and brought into maya and the ivy on the tree was made using the ivy generator discussed in my previous post.

Render 1

 Render 2 with volumetric lighting (this render is slightly lower quality because volumetric lighting raises the render time by about a factor of 20, so I had to lower some other settings)