Some Billiard Balls I made in Blender 2.63.14 for the BlenderGuru Photorealism Contest. Everything is setup up for Cycles but I'm sure it would be super easy to convert it to Blender Internal. Textures were made with Gimp 2.8. I only rendered it at 250 samples in order to keep some of the noise, but you could render it longer if you want. All the textures are in the zipped folder. The dust on the lens texture isn't included because I found it online so I don't know the licensing on it. I hope this is useful for somebody. :)
Yeah, I saw that the deadline was so close so I freaked out and decided to make this, haha.
How did you unwrap the sphere. I keep getting weird configurations and they are not as neat as yours. Can you explain?
You don't need to unwrap the sphere. All you do is make the sphere, then make a material for it. (in cycles) and the in edit mode select the striped portion of faces in the middle and make a new material, say blue. Then assign it to those selected faces. Then down in the settings part of the material select the same colour so you can see it in solid mode. Then duplicate the balls and change colours. However when you change the colour on a ball make sure you duplicate the material by clicking the little plus sign next to the 'F' and the 'X'. Then position a light where you want it. Then make a base, probably green as pool tables are generally green. Next place the camera in the right spot and you should have a good result. This is my one that I made using that technique. http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/69272
i saw this one posted in the bkendergurus photorealistic contest ....