I worked in this project about a week. This is the final render:
Render time: 50 mins. 1280x1024
OSA 11.
Only radiosity was used.
File size: 950 Kb.
Faces: 87.608.
I bit shiny, but I like it.
I think is near of photorealism. What do you think?
very nice! theres a lot of detail in there, but the shine on the pieces makes it hard to SEE the detail…i would turn down the lights on the left and maybe put one above or on the other side…it makes your lighting less stark and lets us see the detail in the pieces…i cant tell thats a knight except that it has a vague horsey shape 
and the ‘white’ pieces are awfully dark. it looks great other than the minor lighting issues. good work!
very nice
but the board seems to end to suddenly, maby a different texture on the side?
I think that u can see the detail and the light should stay the same but its up to u m8.
lastly ur gold knight hasnt made its proper move (nit picking, sry)
but otherwise incredibly good, much better than mine
Dsaber: the position of the gold knight is perfectly legal. Assuming gold is white, the king’s knight starts out on g1, and from there Nf3 is a valid first move. From the position of the rook and king, white then castled king-side, which explains why the king now sits on g1, with the king’s rook to his left. Not to be pedantic or anything. 
VERY Good!!
I think you should add a nice wooden base to the chess board.
I like the way the rough looking material clashes with the shiny metal material you have on the pieces
This came out very nice in the end. Great use of radiosity too!
One of the best uses of radiosity I have seen actually.
BgDM
I love it, it has some really nice materialls. Keep it up.
Wow. Very nice indeed. I have no crits, other than the shineyness is over done a bit.
Again, very nice.
very, very good. [>] Much better then my chessboard
again - it so very nice to see people making use of radiosity. very clean and neat work!
Great render. Nice chess set, too. You’re right that it’s near photoreal. The only thing I noticed was a little bit of aliasing in the highlights/reflections on the knight in the upper left of the image.
Good work, man.
AWSOME man keep it up very shiny but looks good that way!
WOW, great work, It looks very realistic.
It looks a bit aliased overall, try turning octree res up, if you are going to re-render it. 
finally someone does something cool with radiosity… kudos!
Wow! Could we have the material settings for the gold and silver?
R2Blend: I post the gold settings in:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28030&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
The radiosity in the image is not perfect: Look the top of the Tf8 (tower near the black king) and the pawn front this tower, they have stain.
Image without reflection:
I dont know how to improve the light. I dont lower the reflection because the stain is visible. If anybody know a good tutorial about radiosity, post it 
With textures, the image look good 
Later I will add a wood board, when I fix the illumination.
Here the mesh of the knight. I modeller from a mesh circle for the base, then extrude, scale, extrude, scale, subdivide, …
I am thinking about write a tutorial how modelling a knight, but I am newbie in blender and my english is not good (I only speak spanish).
Thanks for all comments.
The image looks great!! … almost perfect…
My only issue is the fact that the Silver/Blue Bishop and the Gold/Blue Bishop (the ones that have been moved), could not possibly be placed where their at… if your pawns never moved forward, your King can not jump over a piece, so it is impossible to have the Bishops move on the other side of the king… You can only move Bishops if the row is clear…
Great job…
____SysAdm
SysAdm: I believe you’re referring to the rooks, and actually, there is a way for the a rook to end up on the ‘wrong’ side of the king. The move is called castling, and you can find the wikipedia entry on castling here.
BTW, viriathus, I like the design of your chess pieces. Simple yet elegant.
Aaack! There are hideous normal problems on the non-reflective mesh, it seems. What are those? Did you not recalc the normals after smoothing and subsurfing it? What is wrong with those? I like this project, it turned out quite nicely. I think you should try to make the tutorial anyway. Reading the methods of different folks is always valuable, everyone has their own way, typically with its own merit. If your English isn’t great (and it certainly isn’t bad) then go ahead and take lots of screenshots and let them illustrate the process as much if not more than your words. Keep it up.
SysAdm:
My only issue is the fact that the Silver/Blue Bishop and the Gold/Blue Bishop (the ones that have been moved), could not possibly be placed where their at… if your pawns never moved forward, your King can not jump over a piece, so it is impossible to have the Bishops move on the other side of the king… You can only move Bishops if the row is clear…
Well, the position is not exact because white have done 10 moves and black 8. Here the move list:
1.e4 e5, 2.Nf3 Nc6, 3.Bb5 a6, 4.Ba4 Nf6, 5.0-0 Be7 6.Re1 b5, 7.Bb3 d6, 8.c3 0-0 9.h3 — 10.d4
This is the Spanish opening (or Ruy Lopez) closed variant, ECO code (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings) C92. Here a link: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessopening?eco=C92
I set the pieces from my memory and, well, I dont play the spanish!
anogarlr:
Aaack! There are hideous normal problems on the non-reflective mesh, it seems. What are those? Did you not recalc the normals after smoothing and subsurfing it?
Yes, I never zoom over a piece and set reflection high because I dont want to see the black noise . 
And yes, I recalc normals with CTRL+N. The black noise is product of radiosity.
The scene have not lamps, only a plane with material setting emit=1. The pieces have faces with small size, and the semisphere and the “lamp” have faces a bit bigger. If I subdivide the “lamp” and the semisphere, the render time is looong.
Other solution is set subsur = 1 (now the pieces have subsur = 2), because the faces generated are more bigger than the plane lamp faces, and the noise go out.
Later, I will try post an example of this (I dont have my computer now).