Displaced Americana: 3D Studio, Photoshop

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This was a project for a 3D studio course and the assignment was to model an actual object as photo realistically as possible.  The object that is I chose was a corncob pipe.  The modeling itself was fairly simple, but the majority of the effort went into the texturing and materials.  I took a series of photographs of the corncob portion of the pipe from several angles, and stitched them together in Photoshop to create a seamless texture that looked the same as the pipe itself.  The other material I spent a good deal of time on is the shaft of the pipe which I created a procedural texture for instead of mapping photographed textures to it.  I was also happy with the interesting reflective surface that the pipe is sitting on. 

Technical aspects aside, I tried to make the image interesting by taking the object and placing it outside of its normal context.  A corncob pipe is about as American as apple pie, so I decided to place it in a traditional Japanese environment to create a juxtaposition to the pipe. 

[Right-click the image to download the full resolution file]

Above is a closer render of the pipe to show more detail in the actual object, and below you can see a photograph of the actual pipe that I modeled.