It's a good site that one, I like how he made all the lighting challenge scenes available it's helped me a lot. As well his book is great, I read it when I first started with maya because david had it lying around, and I'm so glad I did because it's one of the best books written in cg.

That thing about software skills is really important, that's why it's nice to see scene breakdowns when you have more complicated scenes including compositing. I'll see if I can find the breakdown david made for the wine pour test because it's stuff like that a lot of show reels lack and it's an excellent way of showing off a broad understanding.

We even spoke about making a tutorial on how to make a showreel, after we looked for a lightwave instructor we got flooded with reels and I tell you I saw some really scary things. And people lie about their software skills all the time, it really annoys me because it's very obvious so I don't get why.

But go for a matte painting reel, maybe you could even have two reels and make one for modeling as well or keep just a single model. I watched the apache tutorial yesterday, and what makes it outstanding is the fact that he placed it in an environment and lit and animated it. A sequence like that would be enough for a showreel on its own, your helicopter model is good so if I were you I'd drop the other models all together and try to make something really nice with that. It's those kind of things that will catch your eye, and I think the industry likes people who understand all fields of an app to a certain extent because that makes it easier to fit you in to a production pipeline.