I Originally modelled this old Nokia 1600 phone back in 2011. Originally after couple of blender internal renderings I wasn’t satisfied with the output and decided to experiment with yafray. The output from yafray was really nice as it offered lots of features missing from bi and it had even decent speed if you managed to find the sweet spot for the settings.
I decided to do quick test how the scene and the materials transfers to modern cycles. Some subtle grunge and scratch textures used are from Poliigon.
Wow, Great work! Even the old BI result is really great if we ignore the background.
Gotta practice more to reach this level of texturing and lighting.
In blender internal period I usually used procedural materials as I tend to avoid proper UV unwrapping. Thanks to the texture box mapping and spherical mapping it’s not as time consuming to use slight dirt and grunge textures anymore.
Only pieces which are UV unwrapped here are the keypad decals and nokia logo decal. As I have this phone (and i’m still using it thanks to replaceable batteries), it was quite easy to take it apart and take some photos and trace the decals from the photos with inkscape to get sharp vector decals.
Doing the shaders in general is surprisingly easy when you have real object and can shine light to it. From there on it’s just about generating different light setups and tweaking the material settings to match how the object materials behave in reality.