Catapult/Trebuchet
 

I did a quick sketch for a friend and made this. Took about 2-3 hours.

Problems:
-Textures, Acceptable, Nothing special.
-Object would not work in real life.(but this isnt real life)
-Had to shy away from sketch for things i could not model(rips, tears, so on)
-Spokes of wheels are cobbed. They looks acceptable, but if you saw the wire....

I dont plan to go back and redo these... so it is technically the finished model.

Leaned:
-Several quick ways to create certain effects.
-Some texturing as opposed to throwing on a shader or lambert.
-Precision placement
-Conversions, Subd-poly and back.
-New rendering methods.
Heres the pic:

May be just my computer, but the pics really dark man. From what I can see, looks pretty kool. :)

it is pretty dark. but school monitors always make it darker

It's a nice catapult.
As you said it's not functionaly.
Good luck with your future porposes on this scene.
About the render metods, do you want to experiment other rendering softwares (renderman) or you want to experiment rendering techniques (rendering in layers, depth of field, center of interest, fog, light effects, etc)?

Cheers :)

Newty: I plan on trying out several different types of renderings, But i dont know if there are any other rendering softwares available for maya 4.

I tested using different lights and focuses for this project and plan to try it out on other projects aswell.

Nice work!

Try to find renderma i think pixar was the owner of it and now hi is available, wonderfull softwer says meny people, sorry for bad english!!!

Looking good twisted. Maybe you could use Photoshop to lighten that up some. Or just mentally note to overcompensate on the next one. For the darkness. With Maya 4 I would just focus on the basics of good rendering. Lighting, textures. You would be really surprised at what the Maya software render can do with stills.