Rendering of a gold knot

Velvet rendering of a surface

MaterialShading is also set up to allow you to specify in detail explicit physical and geometrical properties of materials—so you can get effects like this:

New "ThreePoint" setting for Lighting—essentially a simulation of a standard placement of lights in a photography studio.

The story of modeling light interacting with surfaces—and “physically based rendering”—is a complicated one, that Version 12.3 has a whole monograph about: