This is a photo-realistic hay bale with polygonal straw bits. OBJ and Maya versions include meshes and textures (with displacement map or normal map, depending on your needs) and efficient topology and stretchless UVs. One Max version: 2009 for VRay 1.5. Two Maya versions: one for mental ray and one for V-Ray for Maya, set up as you see in the render here, with sun and sky and linear workflows, using the displacement map. Maya files are saved as 2009 ascii format but should open fine in 2008 since they use the mia_material_x shaders for mental ray.