Looks good! Right up my alley

Braindump from the last few days of work & research..

How to Add Motion Blur to your 3D Animation in Post Production by Creating 2D Motion Vectors in Maya

http://aloedesign.com/2008/12/maya-2d-motion-vectors-tutorial/4/

-NOTE-
The shutterangle of your camera possibly was set to zero, which results in no motion blur. Just select your cameraShape ->Special Effects and set the shutterangle to 144 (whatever you need).

…:mip.motionblur.node:… – CHEAP motionblur ( does not work with render layers or keyframed cameras )

http://ankitsharma.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/mip-motionblur-node/

Multi UV tile is black in Maya viewport

http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=752&cpage=1#comment-7761

Using HDR SHOP to fake GI ( I used this technique to fake GI using a rendered chrome sphere in HDR than converting it for use in IBL.

Creating a Light Probe Image

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/tutorial/tutorial5.html

Panoramic Image Transformations – how to convert a high-dynamic range panorama between various layouts.

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/tutorial/tutorial4.html

So I finally took the plunge and started learning the proper use of Maya hair system, spent roughly about 10 – 12 hours on learning it to a satisfactory result.

Forget the paint FX tool for styled hair like this, you have to use nurbs curves to get the uniform style. No dynamics have been applied on the hair system above yet.

Check out this tutorial on Youtube if you want to learn how to style Maya hair. Just like everything in CG it takes a lot of time to tweak to get the style you want, but I really enjoyed it.