This salt shaker was modeled from a reference photograph. It's a very simple model, but it doesn't distract from the rendering solutions below.
This is a quick global illumination test. The materials of the shaker parts are all a flat color. The illumination is flat, and comes from a sphere which encloses the area.
One change from the picture above, the lighting. Instead of a flat illumination from the sphere, a spherical panorama has been applied to the sphere. This could be considered image based lighting. The lighting contains color information from a café.
The spherical panorama above was only a single exposure value Panorama... There were several exposure values in the original photography. These were combined to create an HDR. Lighting is from the single HDR. Enough lighting information is provided that you can see light creating shadows based on it's intensity. (The source of the greatest brightness is one of the café's windows.)
5.
Here is the textured result, straight from the renderer. The only postprocessing
was to lighten the image so that it wouldn't look too dark on a PC monitor.
