MDDN 241 - Ambitions

So after very little deliberation I decided to change my idea entirely to something which as far as I know, nobody has tried doing yet. 

Literally inverting the entire premise, the focus of the video is now going to be an object that barely changes. Instead, it is the environment around the object that will be undergoing the change.

So far I have only finished modelling the centerpiece, the crystal around which the video will revolve, and already I'm hitting difficulties with rendering.
30 seconds is far too long for a low-res test render...
I was initially thinking that for this project my ambitions would be severely limited by my lack of knowledge of Maya, but now I'm buying into the viewpoint that it'll be more limited by hardware constraints.
I'm an aesthetic person, I want to make sure that everything is as pretty as it can be, and this model is about as good as it gets for my skill level. But if it's this hard to render then I'm going to be splurting out a video that's nowhere near as good as I want it to look, as I know it CAN look.
To be honest that's kind of depressing.
I'll just have to try and keep the rest of the model as simple as possible...

DSDN 241 - Suddenly: Concepts!

As you can probably see, there is a recurring theme here: bullets.
Simply being the default 'fast moving object', the bullet could easily be replaced with anything (if I felt the need the spheres could be assaulted by a one-legged ceramic tortoise moving at twice the speed of sound).
Bullet is really only there to provide significant 'trauma' to the sphere. That sort of impact is always going to trigger something significant, and in each concept you get a different effect:
The first explodes backwards to reveal a glass interior, the shards of which spiral and reform into some floating pattern.
The second causes the creation of geodetic crystals seemingly forming due to the massive energy of the bullet.
The third is my current favourite, a swirling ball of smoke - interior lit as if by lightning - is hit and is drawn out and back by the shockwave of the bullet. It then rapidly solidifies into a spiral glass structure. The interior light intensifies and the glass explodes, shattering back into free-form smoke.