Chess set render

Here is a quick chess scene made in blender 2.5. To practice modelling I decided to model a chess set as most of the pieces are quite simple shapes. Some of the pieces had harder shapes and I had a bit of trouble with the Rook and the Queen but they turned out OK in the end. The bishop and Knight also caused problems and haven’t turned out that great, I simplified the design for the Knight but the Bishop looks a bit square at the top.

Using mirror modifiers and array modifiers it was easy to set out the pieces on the board. The chessboard was just a subdivided flattened cube with different materials applied to certain faces on the mesh. I then created a simple table and chair for the scene.

I used a simple lighting setup with AO and used an empty object to define the Depth of Field (DOF) focus point for the camera.

Some post processing was carried out on the render using the compositor in blender. I used a sharpen node to slightly sharpen the image and then a defocus node to create the DOF using the z depth information from the scene. I think that the DOF looks a bit too blurry although I don’t know why this is.

A vignette was added to the image by using a lens distortion, greater than math node and a blur node and then multiplying this with the original image.