[EDIT]: V2 coming in a few hours thanks to a good friend!

Okay its really a coffee cup

My most realistic 3D yet! ... made this 5 days ago ... made in blender 2.63.13 and rendered with LuxRender using multable render methods! (see below for methods used)

if you see little red pixels it was my own fault for not including proper lighting or reflections on the left side

the wood texture im quite happy with and was accomplished by making a glossy serface and added texture that i photographed of a table at a friends house and i made a NORMAL MAP (not a bump map!) in photoshop CS5 (nvidias normal map plugin wont work on CS6 ) by modifying it a hell of allot XP and running it threw the normal map feature spending lots of time on the details
i also made a displacement map for the larger details tho with the bookah (DOF) its not really shown

the cup was modeled with a curve and a spin .. nothing fancy and the coffee was nothing more than a flat glossy pannel XP ... oh and cup texture was just made in Photoshop with 2 blue lines ... wish i added just a TIDBIT of bump to it but oh well

the background was pulled off a stock image site a long time ago and i am sorry to say i lost the link but i can assure you that it was legally purchased
The background was taken in to CS6 and added to it a bit of lens blur so this way i can have it close enough to project light well
i added emission to the texture so it actually projects light as it would in the real world with an emission color texture with modified brightness to simulate the different specularities

lighting from above (my environmental lighting) is just the same image stretched out and blurred overhead

I TRIED TO ADD STEAM I REALLY REALLY DID! ... problem was a blender or luxrender glitch caused (i believe) by starting it on linux with a more custom build and finishing the blend on windows ... it generated particles and baked but the cash file was always corrupt (yes i checked and tested on a new blend that it does work ... just not with this one >: ) but a super awesome friend helped me out here and im going to post that as soon as blender finishes baking 14.5gb of fluid dynamics @_@


well i will practice a bit more with realism and luxrender than i will jump out from that and do photo-surrealistic images (aka trippy ) that i always wanted X3

BUT I NEED MORE REQUESTS TO BUILD MY SKILLS!


------(Methods Used)------

I modified and recompiled luxrender to do this

First i did a Photon Map [link] calculating direct, caustic, indirect and finally a radiance hitpoint pass ... this took about 2 hours and the photon map was saved along with the .flm file of the final image

Second i did a render of the same .lux file with a Bidirectional Metropolis Light Transport (BiMBLT or UB²MLT) tracing all the light and getting the projections all right ... this ran for 8 hours before i was happy

Third i did a Hybrid Bidirectional One Uniform Metropolis Light Transport ... rendering via an nvidia GTX 480 overclocked and an overclocked core 2 duo running at 3.2ghz this ran for a staggering 75 hours to make 150% sure it got absolutely as many hits as possible ... i than saved the .flm file

Forth brought all 3 FLM files in to luxmerger.exe and merged them all together ... i opened the .FLM in luxrender than tonemapped the image and played with lens effects but i chose very little lens effects ... i exported the scene as a tonemapped 32-bit uncompressed .HDR file

FIFTH and final - i opened the .HDR file in to photoshop CS6 and fixed up a bit of the tone mapping, did a few touchups in the 32 bit file than converted it to a tonemapped 8 bit file and removed any stray photons, i did a bit of smoothing on the edges (forgot to enable anti-aliasing) and embedded a digital watermark!

COMMENTS PLEASE!! I LOVE THEM!!!

[edit] why not use cycles? it did not work for steam (was not expecting the glitch) textures are far harder and its not realistic enough as of yet ... was not worth the risk at the time on an image i aimed to be my most realistic