Sure, you could animate it realistically even if you only use normal and transparency mapping-just make a lower res model and animate it to the mapping.

I'm a basketball player, and I'll tell you...

Thanks for the mac-pc advice.

Anyone on the number of installs?

Hey guys, quick and rather general question--
I have Maya 2008 (student) for PC and run it on Windows XP. I've installed it on two computers and it hasn't given me any indication, but I may want to...

Try going into Wireframe mode (hit 4) or scaling all of the objects in the scene really large so that you can easily zoom inside the cube, or go into X-ray mode, or cut off a face of the cube, or...

In my experience the only difference between Mac and PC Maya versions have been minor control ones--Mostly mouse buttons, but you really shouldn't see anything else. As far as performance/power...

Yeah, the top handle looks like it took a lot of edges with smoothing, you could definitely take down the poly count without losing very much detail.
I really like the reload-clicky handle part on...

Check the plugin editor if you see any application disappear, in fact.

Yeah, the first time my mental ray disappeared I started freaking out, too. I did some really weird stuff to render a scene...

Yeah, like Gect said, that looks way too bright. Also, you may want to (Actually, you most definitely want to) scale back the reflections on your material (Just do it through the attribute editor,...

The two axes that it shows are the focus point-The point at which the light is aimed. The second is the light itself.

You can access these by pressing T or hitting Show Manipulator Tool. If you...

Nice! I want to rig that really bad now >_> Wish I had time to put together a mech. I like that one, though.