Jeez, it's been a while since I did a project without a tut! I was walking around my house thinking of something to model (as Steve recommended) and the one thing that stuck out at me was my chess set. My sister bought it for me about a year ago in Mexico. It's a pretty nice hand-made marble set, with a lot of detail in it. I really wanted to use ZB3 on this, but I guess I'll have to suffer doing it the old fashioned way.

I also just happen to be reading the book "Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How A Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine" for school. For those of you who don't know, Bobby Fischer was a genius chess player (best one to come out of America) and was the one that finished the Soviet's many reigning (35+ I think) years over chess. My dad talked about him a lot, and was a big fan of him.

I'm going for 2 shots. The first one is just a basic chess setup, the second is going to be the end of "The Game of the Century". "The Game of the Century" was a match between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer, when he was 13-years old.

I took a bunch of reference pics, but for most of the modeling I'll just look at the pieces in my hand, which already feels kinda cool to actually touch the object you're modeling.

For the rendering, I'm gonna try some ambient occlusion renders (they look so good, always wanted to try them out), but when I get to the texturing I'm going to take a stab at Maxwell (hence the reason I told Andreas I'd need his help in particular).

-Steven Palmesano