Don't have any real excuse though.
This is a rendering challenge from CGTalk Israel forum -
render a given model of a cheese and knife.
Here's the result I have so far:
I used the following lights and materials.
Lights:
* Area light to simulate a kitchen window.
* Spot light to simulate indoors lighting with hard shadows.
* HDRI image for reflections.
Materials:
* Cheese - Mental ray SSS material, with a noise texture in the specular map.
* Knife - Mental ray DGS material, with maximum glossy and specular values.
* Knife handle - Simple blinn material with a very dense noise for a bump map, eccentricity 0.4 and specular roll off 0.5 to create softer speculars.
* Tray - Blinn material with wood texture.
