Claude Raguet Hirst’s A Gentleman’s Table
This rendering has taken me the longest time thus far (about a month from start to end). It’s quite complex, with a lot of different objects, so I modelled it by manually matching the perspective in the scene with the perspective of the painting, and then carefully inserting objects into place so that they fit into the correct physical location in the scene. (For earlier renderings, I mostly did things by eye, but in this rendering, the objects align almost exactly with the original painting.)
The objects that required painting (e.g. the sugar pot, the pipe, and the lemons) were painted in Mudbox with Ptex textures. The playing card textures come from a mixture of real card images, including Bicycle and Hoyle cards. A volumetric effect is used for the tenebrous back and left side of the image.
The tablecloth texture was recreated from the original image using Inkscape and Photoshop.
The rendering was completed in about 10 hours using the PxrVCM integrator in RenderMan, which handles caustics well.