I started the project not having any prior experience with any of the programs offered for the project.  I downloaded and tried Povray with very little success.  I tried moray thinking things would be easier but they were not.  I followed a tutorial that I found using a google search; http://www.stmuc.com/moray/metut03.html.  I finished making a few objects that they walk you through but thought that since 3d Studio Max is a more powerful program I would find more use if I learned this program.  I found some concepts similar in the two programs, so I learned a little bit faster.  The program intimidated me because of its complex look.  I followed a few tutorials to master the basics.  Here are the tutorials I used; http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/1322 which helped me greatly with wireframe rendering, along with the push values and relax modifiers.  I did not understand the concept of raytracing or even how to go about it but I found the basics at http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/How-Raytracing-Works/6657.  This gave me enough information that I was able to play around and learn the rest by trial and error. 

   I was downtown looking for something to take pictures of when I saw the Watertower and thought that it would be a fun building to create.  I used the pictures to try and eyeball the buildings scale.  When I finally started the Watertower I created a sphere and extended its vertices.  For the railing, I created a tube and rendered it in wireframe.  I initially had troubles setting the legs in their right place after making the initial one and copying the others from the original.  I decided to use a pivot point set in the center of the sphere to rotate around the bottom of the sphere and add each leg.  I did the same thing with the posters, which didn't end up taking long.  I selected them and adjusted the pivot length in order to set the posters so they looked mounted on the legs of the Watertower.  I put spotlights around the legs and railing to simulate the spotlights that they have on at night.  I also put omnilights in the sky to simulate the sun, when I realized that all the hard work of adding the spotlights would make no sense if it was day time.  I decided to make my final picture taken at night from below.  I found it difficult to make roads and the downtown location, so to save me the trouble of making nice ground, I took the final shot from below facing the sky.  The sky was a picture of a sunset that I had saved on my computer.  I shaded the picture down so that it looked like night time, and added stars to the picture to give it a better look.  To create this, I used adobe photoshop, which took some time to learn how to fool around with this program.  I saved this image as a bitmap and had to change the rendering environment to use the image that I saved using adobe.