If you would like to work on your lighting and texturing skills then check out the CGTalk Lighting Challenge; download the model of a fruitbowl and post the result of your work to compare it with other artists.
As stated before, no textures with this model, so some work will involved in the shading. Although shading is obviously important, the main study of this exercise is the lighting. This is a very open challenge, so any app and lighting technique such as GI etc, is fine to use. If there are enough entries, then maybe we could split into GI and non GI entries, but for now we will keep everything together. Also, there will be no set time deadline to start with, we will give it a couple of weeks and see what sort of response we get. For future challenges we may have locked off views, but for this one, any composition is fine.
Read the Lighting Challenge pages on CGTalk (and get the models). There's also a thread on Elysiun where you can see some Blender results.
