Here is my mage rendered with the new cycles render engine. I’m relatively new to Blender (and to 3D art also), and I was always amazed by the photorealistic renders, so I tried to make my image as photorealistic as possible. Any comments, and especially critique, are welcomed. 
overall a very good render especially for someone new. i like the chrome globe much, glass mugs look very realistic. dices look a bit noisy still but that can be purpose idk. the table needs some more work. the basic wood texture can use a better texture. you seem have used one solo plane for the table and maybe one external texture.
try some bretts putted together. the varnish will look better with a little less bumpiness i think. i would use a glass material for just the varnish part of the table if possible (masking)… you have inspired me to make a table like this 
just a question: just a material testrender or what is the story behind this composition?
Thanks for you comments. There is no story behind this,I just tried to make scene as realistic as possible. And yes, you are right, table is made of one scaled cube. I tried to compose it from multiple boards, but then I had a problem with placing a long scratches across them. In a real life, such a scratches should be continious, without any shifts when getting from one board to another. In my case, I was always getting ugly artefacts, when trying to make this. It was very hard to place scratches (I used a bump mask for them) correctly. By the way, is there any methods to place one texture or bump mask across multiple objects (each one having its own uv mapping)?
can you show nodes set up for the dices
i guess you defined 2 materials
and did you use glass or transparent mat node here?
happy 2.6
@almalm …"I tried to compose it from multiple boards, but then I had a problem with placing a long scratches across them. "
if you join the meshes you can unwrap it as whole and make a separate uv-layer of the top-view for example.
for lighting i used white planes. bit cold right ?. so i changed the light-set-up also ;). this node setup is cool for some metals also.
Attachments
2RickyBlender
Yes, I used 2 materials - glass for surface and translucent for volume. Here is the nodes:
2Blutarsky
Thanks for your help, I will try it
