Hi,
Thanks for your reply.

I am very new to working with Maya, so most of what you said i "sort" of understand conceptually, I just have no idea how to applly it in Maya.

I have made some small progress though. After fiddling with it for over 11 hours I managed to put a texture on it. It rendered and it looked like crap.

See, what I need to understand is the order of things.

like:
step 1 create a sphere (im using polygon .. should it be nurbs?)
step 2 assign a new material (im using blinn with a .png file for the texture)
step 3 right click and select face
step 4 select Polygon UVs->Spherical Mapping
step 5 change the Horizontal Sweep to 360
step 6 change the Vertical Sweep to 180
.... that's about as far as I get
When I render it it lookls like crap. Nothing like a glass globe
So, I hunt and I peck and I hunt and I peck and on and on and I don't find a thing that tells me how to make this polygon sphere look like glass.
Once I apply the texture the tranparency slider under the Common Material Attributes does not do anything it won't even move

One thing that in my early experience about Maya is that the user interface is not that intuitive nor is it easy to get around.
I have never figured out, for example how to unset something without doing an undo. All of the attributes that I see with the checker board square from what I can tell are those that are either unset or default settings. Once I set something it changes from a checkerboard to a square with an arrow pointing to the right (screen shot included) How the heck to do un do that. Suppose I have added several more polygons and some other things and decide I want to do something different with a setting for the color of a polygon in a material.

The only way I know to 'undo' a setting is to undo ALL the way back to where it was set, or delete the object polygon and start over.

Why isn't there a clear or reset right menu click?

And why is there no dropdown list of the objects you have in the scene? It would be nice if I wanted to select an object that was inside another object using a dropdown list instead of having to navgiate through that 'graphical' navigation of that hypergraph.

I see the need for the hypergraph for some find detail work, but at an object level all i want to do is select something a dropdown box is way more efficient.

Any way I digress from my original subject.

Creating a glass globe in what is considered the one of the premier modeling programs should be a lot easier than the way it is currently done.

I performed something similar in about 15 minutes in an On Line game called Second Life. I created a sphere, selected the material glass, applied my .tga texture (SL does not do .pngs) set the transparancy in real time to what I liked and created a light that shines on the inside. Now there's no fancy ray tracing or photons, but the procedure for creating the components required to make the object was simple.

I don't have a "Maya" vocabulary yet. Creating a glass globe is done with what? A shader? 2D Texture, 3D Texture, A DGS Material? What?

Whew!

Thanks,
wizzie