WOW thanks!! that was something it lacked (among other things :D)!
gonna try it right now!
That’s a pretty nice progress, Selrond!
However, I’m not quite convinced that the render time hit from the SSS is really worth it, but I like the idea of a subtle color variation along the length of the pepper.
Here’s the fine-tuned version of my previous shader - on your mesh this time:
I scaled your mesh down quite a bit, though, so that the bump strengths fit better. And I changed the world background to a HDR, to have more lively reflections.
The shader now uses three bump maps: A Voronoi texture for the basic “cellular” structure and two stretched noise textures for the “stripes” and some generic dents.
I guess you have too strong bump… Compare it with the reference in the first post 
Here we go!
-warmer light
-color improvement (see node setup)
Added this to color socket of diffuse and sss shader
Thoughts? 
Thanks for your idea, but I’m OK with the SSS, as it is not going to be extremely complex scene…
Feels like getting there!!
-improved colors in color ramp above - more saturated blood-pepper-like red 
Okay! Calling the red part (almost) finished, I’m moving out for the greeen part (I should really learn how they’re called :D)
Node Setup:
Any suggestions for the green top part?
IkariShinji used an image texture {of a cucumber!} to texture the stalk, that looked pretty good.
If you are looking for a procedural texture I think the best idea is to unwrap the stalk so it is basically ‘straight’ across an UV plane
Then apply a wave texture along the length of the stalk to control the ridges and colouration.
e.g.
UV unwrapped the stalk - very badly because I did it very quickly!
… wave texture twisted by noise offset
… B/W colour ramp to alter the profile of the stripes which drives
… a colour variation
… a bump
… into a diffuse/glossy mixture
Best of luck
Martin
Thanks! Will try that out!
If you push the modeling of the green part a bit you can probably get good result with a dirt map and a color ramp of green.
Loving the progress of this, adding the color ramp to the red part really set it off for me! Well done!
Hi, just saw this thread, noticed the problem has probably been solved a while ago but I made it a challenge. The render came out a bit low polly closer to the tip but Im quite happy with the result. Here are the links to blendfile and image. Used a texture from cgtexture, dunno if it gets included with the blend file. Im quite new to blender and its awesome! Any feedback is appreciated ofc!