Beginning of TAFE Work and Stuff

Last post, I mentioned that I would talk about some of the 3D class work I have coming up this term. I have two different 3D classes now, which could probably warrant for two different posts, but meh. $2.50 Stream games aren't going to play themselves.
First off lets talk about my 3D environments class. As I hinted at before the main project for this is creating a huge futuristic city. You may remember that I tried to do this type of thing waaaaaay back in 2010, but I got limited by my computer when the poly count got too high. I'm not making up excuses there either, a 500,000 poly scene with a dualcore computer that doesn't even have 2GB of RAM isn't fun. It got to the point where I just gave up, because not being able to move around a scene is a major morale killer. These days I'm supporting a kick-ass setup which I recently bought because of the diploma. I have no excuses in that regard now.
Everyone in my class have to create their own building, and then pool them together so everyone can make their own totally awesome city without having to worry about modelling every single damn building. I find this to be quite a good idea, and we of course can mess around with the meshes once we get them so there isn't 30 or so identical cities in the end.
So far I've made my one building for communal use, and a rough concept. First off, lets take a look at the concept:

As you can see it's quite bare bones, with a lighting system added to make it look purdy. The assignment brief said we could use any software we wanted for the concept and after rage quitting while trying to paint something up in Photoshop, I decided to just create a still in Max. Like, why not? Works for me.
Like it's 2010 counterpart, I'm going for the whole floating city idea. I dunno why this keeps appealing to me since I hate the ocean, but I guess the whole media frenzy of the world supposedly flooding has always appealed to me. How would we live? I like to play around with ideas how we would, and this is one of those.
Where would we get the resources to build such a thing if the world did flood? Fuck knows, I'm just the technical artist. Here is my building:

Now lets chat about the 3D Character class. Or rather I talk, and you listen intently lapping up my every word.
Like I said last post, I would probably be creating Jake Blues from The Blues Brothers. Considering I kinda forgot about it (whoops), and the concept art was due, I went with him. I quickly did this sketch up in Photoshop today (quick for me is roughly an hour and a half) and this happened:

Um, yeah. Probably not up to it's full potential, but it will do. I do feel as if I'm getting better at tablet drawing when you compare it to some other stuff I've attempted. I don't want to even link those. Ah well, I want to be a 3D modeller, not a drawer. I'm only really doing this because I have to.

While I'm here I mind as well give an update on the tram video. I've slowly but surly being rendering out the frames. I've done 250 so far, with probably about another 100-150 to go. It's such a slow process, and it locks up my whole computer:

The problem is that this computer takes up most of my spare time (sad I know) so when it's locked up like that, I'm at a loss of what to do. Which is why I've been kinda putting it off, but I've been making good progress these last couple of days.