Zebra-striped work desk

This project is part of an assignment for my studies at FH Salzburg. The goal was to create a photorealistic still life - preferably situated on a desk.
I decided to play a bit more with lighting and the warmth of lights than usual to create a moody scene. The general feel and look is inspired by my previous cozy home office render, I wanted the two projects to have a similar flair.
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Most assets were made from scratch in Autodesk Maya for practice. I mostly used public domain PBR textures, but some Quixel Megascan roughness textures were used aswell.
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Initially, the plan had been to utilize VRay for the final render, but due to the ongoing Covid-19 situation and lockdown regulations, I wasn't able to take advantage of the university work machines that had a license for the renderer. Thus I exported the entire Maya scene, recreated all materials from scratch and - at last - fell back on Blender Cycles for rendering.
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Due to the hardware limitations of my home office machine, I looked for ways to get a larger resolution than I could comfortably render. I ended up upsampling the native FullHD image to 4x the initial size and was quite suprised at how the details were interpolated by the deep learning ai. I wouldn't consider using this method for commerical renders just yet, but the technology is interesting nonetheless.