A couple old renders

I did these in Mental Ray last year. I didn't model them, but I shaded them 100% procedurally and lit them in Maya, and comped them with Shake.

This one was lit with an HDR and just a couple direct lights. I mapped a fractal to the "sun" direct light so that I could get an uneven effect to mimic sunlight passing through clouds.
This one has actually only about five shaders in total; my goal was to get as much done with the lighting as possible. I used photon mapping for the fill and a series of spots, points and direct lights for the sweetening.
I'll be using these methods (and everything else I learned over the past 14 months since creating these) on my thesis.