An Apple logo I modeled (via script,) lit, and rendered in Maya while I was a Quality Assurance employee at at Alias|wavefront during the port of Maya to OSX. I used the same Mel script mentioned for the logo below, then raytraced with a white reflection plane and a few area lights. Curiously this image went semi-viral, in particular with overseas Apple resellers; if you Google "apple logo", this image is bound to appear near the top. For a few months in 2009-2010, it was consistently the #1 result.

A Maya logo rendered in Maya. I wrote a mel script to take any Nurbs curve (in this case the outline of the Maya logo) and:

• Create a Nurbs trimmed surface in the shape of the outline

• Create a polygonal mesh from the above Nurbs trimmed surface

• Using the "closestPointOnSurface" node, iterate through each vertex in the poly mesh, raising each vertex as a function of distance from the edge of the surface.

A bit brute force-ish, but the simplest way I could find that provided a seamless solution that could handle smooth and sharp corners effectively without modeling by hand. Ran along a few Maya bugs along the way. :-) Here's the script if you're interested: gelcapPolyPlane.mel

Difficult icon to mimic, but an excellent test of Maya on OS X while it was being developed. Again, used the mel script from the Maya logo, and raytraced with reflection geometry and multiple shading ramps. Only one area light used.

An early side view of the locomotive I modeled. See Kelso Locomotive Project to see this thing in action.

A copy of a Tiffany advertisement. Modeled in Maya with Nurbs, except the middle shape which was most easily done with polys. Used non-linear deformer on the fan pattern. Raytraced with black and white reflection geometry in place to get the highlights I wanted. 1 area light and 1 spotlight.