As I am learning to use Maya 7, I have been practicing making scenes based on other pictures or paintings. One of my friends is a painter, so i used one of her paintings for the inspiration for this scene.

I made the table first, using 4 polygon cylinders and the basic Maya wood texture. I think I will have to find a way to create a better wood texture as this one doesn't look "real" enough.

The wall behind is actually a very large polygon cube with the ends stretched to fit. I used a fractal noise and blue color texture for the wall paper.

The window lattice was rather troublesome to make. I experimented with CV curves, and other ways, but i eventually had to use a bunch of polygon cylinders stretched to the right size. I used a similar wood texture for the lattice, just with a slightly different color and smaller grain.

With window glass itself, it took me a while to figure out how to make. I ended up turning of the shadows on it so that the spotlight outside would just ignore it, and then i turned the translucence, incandescence and glow up on the glass to make it look right.

The bowl on the table probably has more surfaces and vertices than the rest of the scene put together, because I made it using the CV curve tool, and then duplicated it and scaled it down. Then I did a boolean subtraction between the two objects to create the inner bowl section. That took a long time to process because I set the number of revolve sections on the curve high enough that it appeared to be a smooth circle.

The apples are duplicates of the same model rotated to different positions. I made the apple model with a real apple that I cut in half and put in the scanner. Then I imported that picture and used it as an image plane so that I could trace its outer edge. After making a CV curve, I revolved the surface and edited it to make it a bit more apple-like. The apple's texture is made from a real apple skin that I put in the scanner and edited with Photoshop.

I made the pear in the same way as the apple except I used pictures from google instead since I don't have any pears at home.

I made the oranges using a tutorial that came with Maya, one used to demonstrate different types of surface materials.

The lighting in this scene was a bit difficult to set up, I made two ambient lights, one under the table and one over the table, with shadows disabled and at low intensity.

The light coming in the window was the hardest thing to make in this scene. I couldn't get the glow to work properly on the spotlight, it kept going through the wall. I struggled with that for a day or so, and finally ended up using a white-yellow spotlight outside of the window, shining in on the table.

The curtain is a lofted surface between two identical CV curves. It is textured with a fiber texture generated in Photoshop and colorized. The translucence and color worked out perfectly and the light from the window is shining through the fabric, with the lattice just barely visible through it.

I rendered the scene using mental ray, set at high settings, and it took about 1 hr 45 minutes.

I am very happy with how this scene turned out, but I think that there is still room for improvement.

You can see the original painting here:
[link]