I’ve been thinking about rendering this in Indigo or Kerkythea, but both of those renderers have somewhat of a learning curve, so I’ll just stick with good old Blender Internal for now.
Enjoy. 
pretty damn fine!
my only crit is the dark brown wood spec is a bit too smooth
Very clean render, I first thought that it was an Ingido render. The chess pieces are also nicely modeled.
Can we see some wires? I have a school project to model chess pieces and I’m having trouble with the knights. Seeing what you did could help a lot 
That looks too good to be in Blender internal . . .
great job,
i really like the outdoor mood.
m.a.
Presenting, in alphabetical order, the wires:
Subsurf level 2 and creases used liberally on pieces like the rook and the bishop, although all pieces have some creased edge loops here and there.
I box modeled the knight using a reference drawing, then made its base by using the to-sphere tool on the lowest edge loop. Once that loop was circular, I extruded the base down from there. The rest of the pieces started off as tubes and were extruded from the base up.
Nice.
Could you plz show the wireframe of the knight
with optimal draw off and subsurf off.
Dude, I love this. Why doesn’t this have more replies? Nice work with rendering as well as modeling!
I question the background, but very nice image anyway. Consider a thin black frame to finish it IMO.
Probably because it started out in Blender Tests, where I was experimenting with Gamma and Tone correction following Yves Poissant’s great tutorial, then moved it to Focused Critique to polish it up before posting it here. So everyone who was following it earlier has probably had enough of it already! :rolleyes:
Anyway, the background represents some kind of outdoor open air gazebo (probably fairly rare in your part of the world) and there really isn’t much more to it than you see in the image.
@JDA: there’s really not much difference with subsurf on or off. Optimal Draw is not on, so the wires you see in the above image are not subsurf wires, they’re the actual mesh.
@Modude, thanks, man, but Yves Poissant showed me how it’s done! Check out his tutorial on Tone and Gamma correction. The power of composite rendering and nodes…
I agree…nice to see this finished. I love the realism you pulled with a BI render…I give it 5 stars. 
Brilliant modeling and exceptional texturing. Wonderful job.
I like it, very nicely done. The post pro is alittle questionable, and the lack of envoronment brings it down a tad, but very nice overall.
Post pro? :spin: What post pro? :spin: Pressed Render button, did a Save As, uploaded jpg to Photobucket. No programs other than Blender were used in the creation of this image. No Gimp, no Photoshop, nada. 
100% Blender. Even the work modifying the textures was done in Blender.
Wow…Well then it looks a little odd in the contrast/saturation/Dof areas. Just small things every now and again cross the image throw it a bit.
I will say, really impressive for a straight render, nice work!
BRILLIANT!
the shot looks absolutely photoreal!
but something about the stuff outside the window reads a bit “off” to me…
but everything in the room is perfect! great job!
jin
Hey, the internal render looks awesome, I guess you needn’t worry about using other renderers. Though I have just one bit of a notice on your scene, the nearer pieces seem to have undercast some occlusion shadows below them, especially those on the lighter squares, they seem to float a bit.
good materials and rendering , alter the edge of the window , where the shadow is dark , and it’s thicness , …
DOF is a little screwed up, but other than that it looks quite near photoreal!
A perfect piece to add to your portfolio
very nice picture as said above. i am really interested in the materials’ settings. perhaps you could post something? 
5 stars ^^