> Includes
As well as some of the standard POV-Ray includes, I also used the Staunton Chess Set include developed by Miguel Garcia Diaz. You used to be able to download this from his site. I just made a small modification to allow the textures for the 'black' and 'white' pieces to be specified outside of the include i.e. as part of the macro statement.
> Textures
Not a lot to say in terms of textures. The pieces and the chess board use a series of shiny plastic textures giving some very nice refelections! The glass used in the table is the same as that used in The Robotic Pyramid.
> Objects
The key object in the scene are the chess pieces created by Miguel! I think he's done a great job in providing a full set of pieces. The quality of them all is excellent.
The table was merely a cylinder with a texture applied.
> Scene
The remaining aspect to the scene was the .hdr image used for HDRI lighting. In this instance, I used the free Vol2-hdri-06_color image from sachform technology. This, along with some others, can be found on their site - they're great quality. The image when rendering was initially quite dark so I needed to set the ambient light setting quite high. I think the green and brown colours work well in the final picture.
> Depth of Field
In order to add some more interesting effects to the main image, Depth of Field Generator Pro was used to add some nice depth of field. There is more control, using this photoshop plugin, than what can be achieved using the blur_samples function in pov-ray.
After much messing around and tweeking, I mean controlled experimentation, I found that the best option was to first render the image, with no anti-aliasing, to produce the depth map - required for DOFPRO (use the post-processing function in megapov). Then render the image with some good quality blur, to smooth the objects, with a very small camera aperture. This produces a very smooth image to which dof can be applied. Hope you like the results.
> Credits
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