When creating this image in Blender my inspiration came from the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
(This whole project took about 2 months of work to finish, and not everyday I use Blender)
I modelled all the pieces of the shield to make it look as if were separate. Then I UV unwrapped the finished model as usual, then applied 7 different textures to it(3 were hand painted).
Then I constructed the cycles material setup, and constantly polished and improved it.
(I created a huge bump setup to it but as I advanced more I figured that the bump made the whole setup unrealistic. Instead I played with the roughness and found it to match real brushed metal)
After the material setup I added some light and combined two HDRI image backgrounds to get the lighting and reflections the way I wanted it.
I then composited it all to make it a lot more interesting.
(used 100 samples at 1920 X 1080)
