No mate it was in house as I was already there at the studio working on the medical series as well. Its the same place I worked on Headcases too so my reputation was at stake LOL. They had probs with the original asteroid (which looked like potatoe with a fractal texture) and before the VFX supervisor went off to the Canadian studio he asked me if I could do it in a weekend at home which I did...for extra cash too!!

For the final we ended up adding geo to about 500k polys (mental ray rendering is fine with hi levels alot of the time) then added the dis and normal map to make it pop as the camera zooms right in close.

Jay