100% pure Eevee Next with no post render editing (except for watermarking).
The only image textures in this scene is the lettering and illustrations of the book covers, which all have been re-created from scratch by me in a vector based application.
The wood, leather, paper, even the slight cracking of the spine on the leftmost book, is all procedural materials.
No add-ons were used, save for the dust particles which was a geo node setup (that I’m not entirely happy with and might re-do).
The environment is 100% black as I wanted to play with hand placed lights. Light linking was used for one light to give some books a slight rim light, so this is a 4.3 affair.
No de-noising was used as literally everything in the scene has its own unique, subtle surface texture to it.
Total time spent is probably little less than a week, with most time spent making the procedural materials and the book cover graphics, trying to be as accurate as possible to their real counterparts.
I tried to build the books non-destructively and re-use them but ran into issues with vertex groups propagating through modifiers (specifically with bevel and solidify) in a way that sabotaged that for me.
Scene:
(Although this is the actual scene since I don’t know how to reduce the cone on spotlights…)
Material:
