Usually I’m hanging out in the python forum, so I don’t really have that much experience with blender as an artist yet. All comments are welcome, but especially comments on how to improve the polished wood material (the stuff the three vertical bars are made of) are appreciated.
for wood you can use the wood material and the colorbands to make some different wood colors, and adjust othersettings in the material panel like noise and so on. Also Materials can be “piled” if some transparency alpha in colorbands is there so for example 3 wood materials could be on top of each other with different sizes and color. I think it would be interesting to simulate the sand or salt with particles, although processor intensive…
Actually I already experimented with particles, but I had some problems with them. I’ll have another go at them though and in the meantime work a bit more on the wood. Thanks for your comment.