Building the chess set took around 4 hours of my time but the end product was definitely worth it. Making the chess pieces were straightforward and simple. All the pieces were bezier curves with the exception of the knight. Making the knight took a bit longer than the rest. I had to design a curve to look like the face of a horse, then closed it, extruded and beveled until it pretty much represented the knight in a chess set. To add more detail, I turned the whole curve into a mesh and subsurfed it 2 times. In order to make the pieces look like crystal, I made a few modifications to the material sample given at this site.
I resembled the chess board to chrome with a slightly higher reflectivity. The lighting was 1 lamp placed on the backside of each army and one with a lower energy in the middle of both. The rendering was higher than I expected and clocked 9 minutes after few modifications. On the other hand, the image was very well done. The Frozen Army isn't perfect though, I realize that I needed to give a wider angle, more energy into the lighting, create a difference between the two sides and decrease the reflectivity of the board. Knowing this, my future models would be much much better.
