I’m rather new to blender dinking around with it for the last year or so. I’ve been watching tutorials and making things based on those. I started to tackle my own projects recently and started getting frustrated with difficult involved projects. So, I decided to take a simple object and perfect it, then move on to a more difficult object.
I started by looking at apples online getting to understand how they are colored and textured then went into photoshop and made my own color map and bump map. I took that file and threw it into crazy bump to get normal and displacement maps. And ended up with this.
This is still a work in progress as the table is using a low rez texture and I haven’t done anything with the wood branch coming out of the tops. I showed my wife this picture and she said it looks like a candy apple. So I tried to up the reflections.
Real Apples are normally not all that reflective so try setting your Roughness to .5 or at least higher.
Also the Resolution of the Wood Texture is too low and you could Look for a Texture for the branch
Apples should be less reflective, as The_Bird noted well.
Also, subjectively speaking, I think there could be some various color tweaks and increased detail contrast on the wood to add some interestingness to the image (which is already quite interesting).
The stems of the apples could use some subtle variations as well.
This morning as I took another look at it, also noticed that my green was WAY to dark. I’ve had another go at it changing colors and adding more stuff to the apples.
The red is too strong. I don’t recall when I last time saw this poisonous looking apples, but they definitely look like artificially buffed. Darkening the red by a very slight amount, adding a bit of magenta tone to it (very minimal) and turning down saturation by a slight amount could improve them. The part where green blends with red looks a tiny bit too smooth in your latest version. From what I’ve seen it usually looks a bit more stripey. A worm hole in one of apples would be a significant detail for realism. Some fingerprints (very, very suttle) and dirt on them would also make them look closer to life.
