Burning the midnight oil —
As an exercise of observation, modelling, illumination and materials, Vinny Morales challenged the class and me to make a 3D version of an oil painting: burning the midnight oil.
Reference Painting —
"There is no death in nature! Everything lives and everything moves, everything inhales and exhales, everything changes every minute", - said the French art critic Thoré-Bürger, and one of the greatest masters of still-life once stated: "Who said one paints with colours? One employs colours, but one paints with feeling".
— Dmitri Annenkov
I started by box modelling in Maya.
After arranging them in place, I did the first lighting pass and then imported every object to Substance Painter. In there, every mesh was textured from scratch. A lot of displacement and curvature maps were needed to achieve the imperfections.
Finally, I imported and networked the texture maps in Maya and, of course, a lot of light and texture tweaking until the final render in Arnold.