Here is a violin I modeled:
https://plus.google.com/+ZacharyAlexanderP/posts/1EcpyjTTnfm
The line around the edge needs to be more visible I think. The scroll was a pain to do.
Heres a shark I did too: https://plus.google.com/+ZacharyAlexanderP/posts/GixdSeBs8Nz
Check it out. Whats it need to be better? Its all node textures and lighting with compositing. The only part I used an image texture on was the jagged line between the gray and white and I used more than one material on the same mesh. I still haven’t figured out how to make it less noticeable. I used photoshop to touch it up a little. I was getting the terminator error too. I had to subdivide it many times so the darker part didn’t have polygon lines. I think the way Blender uses lighting is great but there’s got to be a fix for the terminator problem. The faces are flat and they are noticeable at certain angles. I was trying to think of a different way it would render faces. A vector mesh converter/modifier is the only thing that came to mind. You could use an algorithm that calculates the curvature of the surface of a square-plane on the mesh compared to the position of the vertices of surrounding squares and use this http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2011/07/26/checkerboard-fun/
calculated in cycles over the mesh by angles of light and distance only towards the camera. Just trying to help with ideas. The surface of a square on a mesh would have data in cycles that tells it its pole-angle toward the camera and calculates how big the appearance of the cycles light-attractor patterns in the mesh-square should be to avoid the terminator problem. It might be a dumb idea if it makes renders slower but then you could calculate accurate light no matter the angle on a bumpy mesh using the sum curvature of vertices covered by faces in an area to project the correct light fades only for the direction of the viewer.