I did everything (almost) from concept to painting - I must thank Dominic Grandmont and Samuel Jacques for the Shisha and octogonal table model, and the Morsy brothers for their constructive feedback :-)
I used maya mainly for modeling, but also XSI, since it was also part of a software learning process, and rendered everything in 3dsmax with Vray. There was a lot of painting in the end in photoshop - my goal was to get an illustrative look. I was inspired by many Orientalist’s paintings, for final mood as mush as for details and objects here and there…