Here's a title shot for a racing game we're developing in school. I'm a computer science student so the focus is on the programming of course. I think it's fun to mix the programming with making graphics though.

The picture is far from perfect. The models are the actual game models (3000 triangles each) but I've added some smoothing to this render. The explosions are Maya fluids and since I used final gather for the terrain and cars I had to render the fluids separately to avoid infinite render times.

My compositing/render layers skills are somewhat limited, so I had to paint some things in Photoshop. And I always get a thin black outline around the rendered object... how do you get a perfect alpha when compositing in photoshop?