Here’s a pic i cooked up inabout 30 minutes…
I think its pretty good and yes the smoothness of the displacements could be better but that’ll be some other time.
And also i do realize that the BG of the image hasn’t got a ceiling yet and therefore the reflection isn’t right in the shiney ball.
Here it is:
Salt Shakers
I’m no expert but I like your picture. Maybe the DOF is a little narrow making the nearest shaker look odd but maybe thats just my laptop display. Is it a yafray render? Any post processing?
Looks pretty good! A couple of small crits. First, perhaps increase the DOF. The blur in the foreground and background is a bit much.
A related crit is the reflection in the shiny ball; If the depth of field is short in the image, it will be short in the reflections as well (i.e., distant reflected objects will be blurred).
Scott
Very nice done!! How did you make that brilliant floor?
I think you should work a litlle with the glass texture, for eksampel by making it brighter.
But indeed nice.
thanks all so far for the crits/comment…yah i’ll work on the blur and stuff.
yah its a yafray render
after work tonight about 10:30 central time i’ll work on those and prolly upload a pic by maybe 11:00 or 11:15 if it doesnt take too long
oh and i used an image for the floor and enabled the Disp option in the Texture Map to or whatever tab and set the Disp slider to mayybeee .03
Then i set SubSurf to 3…which isnt the best but i didnt want it to take too long and also i SubDiv’ed the plane several times. The end result was a nice rocky tiled look with sorta smooth mortor in between them
here is a new updated version and the glass looks a lot better along with the tiles
i still have to work on the background environment…
clr, the second version is an improvement. Very nice image! The shakers need some salt (‘n’ peppa) in 'em. I like the caustics. I don’t think the huge chrome ball bearing fits the scene (from a “realism” standpoint - although it does show off HDRI very nicely…) Good stuff!
yah i actually agree with u on the ball…hmm…i’ll think of something to put there…
salt n’ peppa it is…the next version is coming soon!
thanks for the comments/crits
A lot of people have been doing this lately. The background is blured out and there is a chromed ball in the scene. Can this be done in blender or did you render in yafray? Do you need yafray to do something like this?
you can do the reflections, and glass effects with just blender. To get the blurred bg (Depth of Field) and the caustics (the light refracting out of the glass) you need yafray.
Here is a new render but smaller
This is the first one that doesn’t quite ring true. Something about the overexposed salt on the left-side of the front shaker… I think I got it. “If the salt’s so blown out, then why isn’t the cap? And why isn’t a blaze of sunlight hitting anything else in the picture?” Solution is to relight the shaker o’course.
But… nice, convincing images that don’t scream “CG.” I also like it without the globe. Nice suggestion of “sunlight refracting through the edge of the shaker” next to the ashtray.
that looks better. removing the chrome ball has done your picture well. the only comment i have is that the background is too flat. you should model it instead of using a flat background. not that i would do it but you are aiming for realism so …
This is a method of lighting a scene using an HDRI image by a method called Light Probe Imaging. The background bitmap contains extra data that provides the GI lighting for the scene (yes, yafray only - tho other raytracers do this, too…) which can be supplemented by your scene lights. The backgroud comes out blurry all the time… just the nature of the setup (unless you had a very high res HDRI image, I guess)… so artists often add DOF to help blend their scene into the background, as clr has done. A reflective sphere is often added to the scene because it gives a “perfect” reflection of the HDRI image, often helpful to “find” the light sources in the image. 
It really does have a look a of realism, the more visible caustics helped a bit with the second image.
O ok, cool. Now i know. I never could get Yafray to work. 
You can use it in the blender internal renderer if you use AO (I think)
ok i switched some things around, removed the salt in the shaker and changed a few other things (along with the BG to a background setting)
I might decide to change the surrounding environment to actual 3d but that’ll be later on this on-going post/project.
Here is the new one:
Outdoors
something isn’t right with the scene…is there?? feedback is welcome
