Here’s my bowling ball coming towards the pins. This took my CPU 20mins to render, I have no compatible GPU 
I haven’t played much with surrounding objects yet. I have only real-scale alley plane, well lighted. I like how the lights and plane are reflected in the ball. I’d like to make the plane more realistic woody looking, but I’m not there yet. I saw some really cool examples here on forum, so I may try to mimic that.
Again I couldn’t imagine that I would be able to make this only 2 days ago. As a practice project, I wanted to model a guitar, but I didn’t know how to do curves so I did that with rough vertices only. This lecture is game-changer for that and I can start over with my guitar 
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In Blender, the GPU (if you have one) is not always faster than the CPU!
This because not everything Blender needs to calculate will be done on the GPU.
For example, materials and modifiers and done in the CPU.
For a big project, you can do test runs to determine which CPU or GPU is the fastest.
Also, determine the optimal sample TILE size.
In the old 2.79 courses, there are lessons on how to do this.
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Look a good set of pins and ball. Before long you will find a guitar simple. textures, like making your ball look woody, will come later in the course. A small note on other things you see here, some contributors have completed the course in the older version and are redoing it in the 2.8 updated user interface. So are not beginners.
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