The Curtain - The curtain was modeled in wings3d too, modeling such an object by hand gives me more control over the shape than using the cloth reactors in max.

The Cactus - The spikes of the cactus are made in max with a PArray and instanced geometry. The cactus texture has a layer with a rhinoceros' butt cause it had such nice structure.

Texturing

After unwrapping (in max), I opened the molerat UVW in Corel Photopaint. I layered one of my reference pictures over it, cut out a part using a mask (1), smoothed the edges (2) - there's an automatic option for that in corel, or the possibility to use a soft erazor brush, and copied it very often, with scaling and rotating and erasing parts (3). I tried to follow the direction of the folds of the mole rat skin. At (4) you see the final product, which consists mostly of the edited parts of (1), except the hands and mouth (5) which is taken from another texture or reference.