factory

Yo yo, here is the factory I've mentioned. Haven't gotten around to adding the hanging tarps yet but it's getting there.
As far as the new ideas to beef up my reel, I've got 3-

1.) Shoot background footage (of street or sidewalk or whatever) and track in voodoo or Boujou or something. I have a particle system that I made that spews out snowballs and smashes them on the pavement, creating pieces of snow that themselves get smashed, etc. It looks nice, and I think I could get it to look cool in live action footage without too much effort.

The next two ideas would be repurposed tutorials. I don't know what the professional opinion is of including work that was produced from tutorials in demo reels, but I assume that if somebody noticed a piece and thought, "Hey, that was a tutorial in 3D World from September!" that potential employer would be screwed. So I found two tutorials that I could do, then get my own footage and create my own work based closely on the steps that I learned. Here are the tutorials:

2.) http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/premium_content/3d__and__animation/the_war_zone,_part_three

That's the link to part 3 of this tutorial, parts 1 and 2 are also on this site. Basically an effects shot of a devastated building.

3.) http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/autumnchallenge/raindrops/index.html

Realistic wet branch. The artist uses VRay, which I have no access to, but I assume I'd be able to replace that with Mental Ray.