1. Q: But building models in Maya or 3D studio with trillions of polygons proper reflections lighting luminance takes tremendous experience.
A: What? The BG will be photo realistic in 3D with a lot less than trillions, billions, or even millions of polygons. Lets consider this from a different point of view.
Imagine that every single pixel were its own polygon (like a texil,
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/teaching/cs4...s/glossary.htm)
Assuming a screen res of 1024x768, and assuming the coral is about 30% of the area, then we would be talking about 260K polys. But the simple FACT is that this will not require a 1:1 ratio. Usually photo-realism can be done using between 10:1 and 30:1 ratio. Or 26K on the high side, and less than 10K on the low side. Then there is the magic factor, which is where a well trained and skillfully and talented person like Sachs, spends day and night for weeks to months on end creating illusions as these number are shoved even further down.
2. Q: Then converting them to maps for use in directx takes even more experience.
A: It does? I think we just use a little program we wrote to do this.
2. Q: Now This screen saver isn't doom 3 but it takes the same expertise just less time.
A: You seem to have this backwards. While the artist that do video games are often very good, they are not even in the same league as what is required for this type of production. The artists at ILM, Disney, or Dreamworks would be a better match.