looks really good well done man!
have u had any other previous experience with other 3D software?
Im only asking cause ive been using maya 5 weeks or so and ure work and understanding is a lot more advanced than me.

I've been with maya for about as long as you have and ironically
i was thinking that your understanding of maya is way better than mine :lmao:

hhahaha well ure just articulate then!!
anyways well done on the modeling so far u have a good talent.
looking forward to seing more progress.:beer: :beer:

Hey Chris salut frate ;)! Im Romanian too. Just an odd fact. Anyway your model is really goood and I would say your not so much noob as you might think you are. Keep up at it and ypou minght just win :). Cheers! Noroc! :beer:

Wow a countryman... Cool. How come your locations is USA though? You live there?

Anyway thanks a lot and hope to see you around :beer:

Just finished modeling the glass kettle (or whatever it's called) and i thought i'd post a wireframe view of it.

I'm trying to simulate the effect of glass for the kettles but i seem to have no idea how to do it. I tried using a dielectric material but this is all i get. No transparency whatsoever. If i play with the refraction index i get more or less specularity but still no transparency. As if no light is actually refracted into the glass or reflected back. On 1.5 IoR (default) the glass is completely black. The image below was rendered with the IoR set to 0.8. Any ideas how i can get this to work?

Ok never mind about that. Found out what the reason was. Had my ray depth limit too low.

Ok... I played with the materials a little, added a few more details and did a test render (it's not much, but i like it :D ).

I'm going to start modeling the environment now and hopefully i'll have another rendering soon.

this is great work for a newbie...try and light your scene a little better it will make all the difference.

Thanks. I know that the lighting isn't great yet. I kept most parameters low and also used no antialiasing, just so that it would render fast. I wanted to get an idea of how it looks. Working on the ambience now and i'll make some new renderings real soon.

Omg i think it looks very realistic (in its own way :D) just through these test renders!

Thanks Matt. I used a phong material in the end (would have gone with the dielectric one but mental ray causes some problems at rendering my subdivisions... from what i figure, it's because they're not composed just of quads and/or because i have creased edges... i could be wrong though). Anyway the reflections and refractions turned out pretty ok this way too.

Looking really good, well done so far. For some reason after looking at this thread I feel like a coffee :)

Thanks again everyone for all your compliments :), it helped me tremendously and i really feel i've learnt a lot since the beginning of the project. I'm quite surprised i got this far actually since i had almost no experience at all. I owe it all to you guys :D

Anyway, I just about finished modeling the background and did a really quick 3 point light setup. Here's a render preview. I know that there's still a lot of work on the lighting, but i'm pretty happy with the progress so far. I'll be posting some wireframe screenshots of the background objects real soon.