Let's open Blender and set Cycles as the rendering engine. If you are using the CPU to render, you are pretty much ready to go. If you want to use your video card, we need to change a couple of settings.

From the smaller viewport header, select the Display mode and from the drop-down menu, click on the Rendered mode.

Here you have it! The awesome real-time viewport. Now the scene is quite empty, so it is not so heavy and Blender should still be quite responsive. Anyway, it is up to the artist to decide when to turn the real-time viewport off if it becomes too heavy.

To recreate the environment that will contribute to the lighting and the reflections, it won't be necessary to model a whole scene. Instead, we can use an image to fake the environment around the scene and give our objects something to reflect.

To create the environment lighting, we will be following these steps:

Select the key from the scene, add a new material and name it Key. Even if the key material alone will be quite simple, this time we are going to use the node editor in order to set it up.

By default when we add a new material, Cycles will add a Diffuse shader node and of course, the material output. For the key metal we will also need this node, so let's leave it where it is. Moreover, we are going to need a glossy shader in order to add reflections to the key surface.

These are the steps to create the materials of this recipe:

Now the surface of our key is reacting in a realistic way to light, but it is still missing something. Every real key has got some word or pattern on it. To obtain this effect, we are going to add a bump texture at the key material in order to add these details on the surface.

These are the steps we are going to follow to create the bump for our material:

Before we start to create the material we need to add it to the mesh. Let's select the key holder mesh, add a new material to it, and name it KeyHolder.

These are the steps we are going to take to create the rubber material:

As you will have probably noticed our key holder has the shape of the Blender logo. Of course we cannot have just the shape, we need to add proper colorization!

To effectively use a color texture, we need to follow these steps:

First of all we need to add a new material to the wallet. Let's select the wallet mesh, add a new material to it, and name it Wallet.

To create the leather material, we will be following these steps:

Our first scene in Cycles is almost ready. However, we can still do a couple of things to make it look even more realistic. We will now see how to add a nice DOF effect.

To recreate the DOF effect in Cycles, let's follow these steps:

We are getting closer to the conclusion of our first scene in Cycles. It may sound strange but even if we have already set up materials, lighting, and DOF, we still didn't actually render anything yet by pressing the render button. We only looked at the scene through the real-time viewport! So we can see how powerful the Cycles real-time viewport is. But the time for the final render has come, so it's time to talk about render settings.

I thought that a description of each render setting would be better than a mere list of the values I used in this scene. In this way, we can understand better how and why we are doing something like this. Anyway, the following is a screenshot...