I created this video using POVRay in the 1990's showing a spacecraft being sent to divert a comet using a nuclear blast. I didn't use a modeller, I hand coded all the scene files, all the animations, and even wrote an asteroid generation system that started with a cube and subdivided it into polygons.
It has several obvious mistakes (like keeping the fairing around for no reason other than wanting it to look cool), and lots of wasted time panning around the object, but bits of this animation still ended up getting used in a TV show.