Rendered in yafray, the environment it’s in is just my default lighting arrangement.
The bristles took forever to get to look right, and I might make them more dense, but I wanted a “homemade” look to it.
Any crits?
looks pretty good far as I can see. I assume you’re going to add wood texture to the handle. I’m not sure what the sphere is for??
Yea it’s hard to make a convincing wood stick.
The sphere is just part of my generic lighting environment. Helps me judge colors and light intensities.
Just out of curiosity what is your motivation for rendering this project in Yafray? This is clearly something Blender is capable of. Do you have something in mind that you’re going to add that require’s Yafray’s capabilities?
Glad you asked. For some reason, the straw looks way better in yafray. The Blender internal engine makes the straw look like plastic sticks. It might be the way yafray handles the shadows, or maybe it’s the noise level. The crappy thing is that the wood stick looks great in the Blender render, but too dark in yafray.
I might be able to ‘dirty up’ the bristles to make them look better in the blender internal.
I’d say its worth a try. no doubt you would have used an image for the wood texture if it wasn’t for yafray. hmm…if you can render it in blender internal, I’d think the image texture would be the way to go 
Chances are your bristles looked like plastic because the spec on the material was set too hi. Generally materials that aren’t shiny have low hardness and low spec in my experience. You might have success with other settings but give that a try and see if it helps. Blender internal is not just for Blender purists. Its a very good scanline renderer and its certain faster, under most circumstances, than Yafray is. Especially if you use reasonable lighting setups and anti-aliasing settings. I suppose the trick is to balance the speed/quality issue, but if you’re just doing test renders I see no reason why you can’t turn off OSA, hit 50%, and turn down the samples on raytraced lights or AO, and decrease the depth setting on raytraced objects. Good luck