Billiards

Something simple at first glance but very very good lighting practice.

Lighting is hard. Very hard. So, they say one way of learning it is to re-create photographs and that is what I did with this thing right here.
The white parts of the balls required a little more work to look right. I ended up using a glossy material mixed with a scattering volume… and on top of that a glossy coating layer covering the whole ball.
The fuzzy look of the table carpet was achieved by using a lot of small scale displacement on a plane underneath the carpet and then placing it so the bumps just barely clip through the carpet.

Download .blend file.
36MB, modeling: Blender 2.78, rendering: LuxRender.