one month ? yep very posible !

This is a robot I did for my first challange. IN my first month of 3d ever, with maya.

very cool indeed. using fluids for that smoke ?

Well I thought the AA was messed up on the hydrolic rods down there. But its some pattern there I hadn't notice befor. Sorry all is good I think. But here was a pic of where I was talking about.

LOL sorry , I ment noise as in render artifacts.

very nice pose. Great robot.

I noticed a little nose on the bottem edges. Might be AA filter is not set high enough.

really does look great. Like the engines a lot. Good idea with the transparincy.

doing great, looks cool.

one of my bigest problems when I fisrt started out with size was luseing or not keeping the low poly meshes.. just saying its was hard at first for me to make a light scene even with complexity.

not sure what is in your scene but deliting some history after you make sure to get all polys down to the unsmoothed verstions could help.
are you using a mix of polys and nurbs ?

ok.. welp I was wrong. shrugs. sorry about that. Didn't meen to sound like i was pushing for something you didn't want.