Apologies for the late second part. I ended up finishing the modeling on Thursday but I received decent feed back from the professor.
The rocks are on a good path but I had to rework parts of the wheel. This included reworking the panels and making the pivot and poles skinnier. The cube is suppose to be a house like the original image. However the house is obscured in darkness and trees so it is going to be mainly just obscured and only there to fill up space.I added some more poles and wood pieces between the cube and wheel than on the picture above.
I also began to experiment with lighting in Maya and managed to make something I believe is a decent starting point. I have begun texturing and adding materials to all the models.
The rocks themselves are done and I will an entire blog post dedicated to texturing. However I imagine it will be a pain to texture the wheel because each plane is kind of its own individual mesh. This is my first time modeling and texturing with NURBS so it has been an… interesting experience.