My latest YafRay rendering…
Updated 6-12-06
If I feel up to it, I may render this with high YafRay settings, to brighten up the blinders and smooth out the shadowing. Light is passing through the blinders, yet the ambient light is not reflected enough.
Would You mind if I asked You to tell us sth about those soft shadows?
Is it made with spot?
I used one Area Lamp with a setting of 3 Samples. More samples give you smoother edges (and longer rendering time). Note, I said smoother, not softer.
The size of the Area Lamp’s source also determines how the soft edges appear. The smaller the source the sharper the edges.
In Yafray, the shadows appear softer than Blender’s Internal rendering process. Since I used YafRay, I made the World Color white. This gives me maximum ambient lighting in the shadowed areas.
I placed my Area Lamp very far away with a small source size, thus creating “sun light” with some soft edges.
nice one :)… i like the menu… can i order something 
that’s very intresting
For me it works with skydome only (yafray’s AO) with no support for Full GI. Am I right?
That’s what I used…
as I thought
easy accesible soft shadow with yafray’s GI gone…
slurp
you rendering is to gray’isch.
you might want to give the shadows a different color.
also when you talk about sun light your light seem to be
too much just white. put in some yellow. that might help.
also a mini tint of blue for the shadows might be good.
claas
Very nice. I really like the menu :D. One suggestion though- what about silverware?! Shiny forks are good… very good… preciousssss…
the ‘jelly’ (its jam man!!!) lids are too smooth, they need to be a little bumpy/distorted and although the light is low they would be better reflexing a little (Unless they’re not covered with shiny plastic like they are in UK)
When using Full GI (no Cache), at the highest res, I anticipated that the image would become too bright, being that the bouncing of light rays would be more thorough. So, I reduced the lamp’s energy level. Usually 20% decrease works for me, but not in this case.
7 hours to render on P4, 2.8gHz, with all unecessary external Windows programs disabled.
(NOTE: This is an old image. The one on the top of page 1 is newer)
I tried a few “fixes” with PaintShop, to correct the lighting, but it gives the image a “doctored look”, so I aborted that route. …but then again, if you like that kind of look.
cough cough girls gone wild ahem
You are the first to notice? I do that some of my sample images here. There’s has been “Spin’s Apartment”, “Spin Gone Wild”, and a few others not to mention 
Looking good. A couple of small points. Pepper shakers normally have more holes that salt shakers and one shaker should be rotated a bit so it is not at the same angle as the other. Also, venetian blinds have a heavy, thicker bottom piece to finish them off…kind of a rail where the string knots are tied off and hidden away. Very realistic otherwise. Keep it up.
I see that you’ve reused the bowl from your ‘condonments’ picture. 
The salt and pepper shakers don’t look that good - especially the holes.
cough cough girls gone wild ahem
So, I’m not the only one to notice.
Aligorith
At the top of page one, I updated the pic with the newest one.
I know this is “Finished Projects”, but with the C&C, I decided to do more improvements. I plan on doing more too.
The salt shaker shadows are looking weird.
My original idea was to focus on the jelly packets, and use DOF for the rest of the scene.
Hey spin, the render is interesting, gotta tell you not exactly photoreal, but good. Maybe you can tweak the lighting a little, also using full GI will improve the image, you may wanna try a blue-ish light and a little volumetrics to give it a daylighty look.
c ya
awsome looking image!
your texture work is always super detailed like the real objects,
are you using a scanner or are you taking photos?
i really hope you are not making those textures all by had, wayyyyyy too much work.
garphic -> Thanks. I agree on the lighting and the full GI (which will probably take 8 hours to do). But what exactly is volumetric in Blender?
I made the Sun Light yellowish, as suggested by somebody, however I may need to create a few blue panels (outside of the window) to have some blue reflections, and maybe a blue lamp to give some glow from the outside.
Wu -> Thanks for the C&C. I did scan the Jelly Packets, but they looked terrible in Blender, so I had to re-draw them in PaintShop, with layers, to make them perfect. The rest of the textures are downloaded from the internet. Most of which can be found in my signature at the bottom of the post with the Soda Tutorial. I googled the place-mat and menu.
All images have been resized to fit this forum.
Most of the originals are a few megapixels large.
The rest of the textures are procedural. Oh, there is one more image not seen. It is a huge concave plane behind the camera. It has the image of the interior of a real diner. I did this just to give the chrome lids on the shakers to have something to reflect.
Very nice! I think that a napkin under the butter knife would give it that little diner extra. Fantastic render though Spin, not quite the level of your kitchen but very good none the less.