Just had an itching to do a chess set all of a sudden. I know, I’ve got other projects going… Oh, well. No board yet, still have to model the knights, but other than that I have one piece of each color so far.
I hate you. 
Those pieces are gorgeous!
I don’t know if the knight will come out so well, but I’ll try.
Now with knights! Onto the board…
Indigo or Maxwell?..
That’s what I was thinking. 
Would you believe Blender Internal?
Actually, I might. It does almost look like you’re using sky texture AO. Nice job. :]
Cool… I like it.
Did I mention that I hate you? 
Nice render.
Finished modeling the board, but the materials are only placeholders. I’m thinking of black and white marble for the squares and either wood or metal for the base, but I’m open to suggestions. I had to turn off the HDRI sky texture to get my whites to look, um, white.
Very sleek…wish I owned a set that nice 
some chess sets arent the traditional black and white, and dont need to appear to be, you could leave the sky in and have yours looking unique.
That’s true, but with the HDRI the black and white squares look almost identical. I’ll make a render later on to show you what I mean. I suppose as long as I could get the squares to look different…
How did you get the first couple of renders to look like old western movies. by the way nice render. I tried and failed miserably at my chess set.
What do you mean?
I think he means all grainy and stuff…looks cool…but it can be a pain if you don’t intentially want it that way…
Ok, this is the exact same render as in post #11, but done with the sky texture. The dark one is the raw render, the brighter one was tweaked in Picasa.
It seems the only way to get the contrast was to up the AO samples all the way to 16, but it’s still a little noisy… I think it’s a bug with Blender’s sky texture settings.
I like the look better without the sky texture so I ditched it. Board now has actual materials!
I was going to mention with the AO you might try turning up the power from 1 to about 1.5 and see what happens.
Nice work (it is a gorgeous (and simple!) set)!
-albert