Ray tracing is turned on in render globals and refractive index is at 1.5 but I may know the problem. i did not model the wine glass using curves. I did it using Nurbs and converted them to pollys to combine them and then to SubDs to detail a little. Does this mean that it will be difficult to render correctly?

I just thought id model it practising what id learnt so far..

If you modeled it using NURBS, then you had to have drawn a curve to make that wineglass, right? Its like the oldest 3D trick in the book - revolving a profile curve to make a NURBS or poly wineglass. I figured thats the kind of tutorial you followed to make yours.

You can either make the curves in Illustrator and import them or you can use the CV curve tool in Maya to draw a profile curve like the one in the pic I made.

I have no idea why the refractions aren't working for you. Probably something silly. Try creating a nurbs sphere and applying your texture to is and see if it renders properly.

Have you got an environment for it to reflect?

no i just modeled 3 bits (base, stem and top) out of nurbs and then converted to polys to combine them! It might be an old trick but i dont no it haha.

does anyone have a tutorial to follow as i cant find a free one on here? i was basically just playing with nurbs and decided to create the wineglass shape.

i dont have an enviroment to refelct as i had just thought of creating a plane glass in a white enviroment.

ok guys iv found a suitable tutorial using curves and I_glass shader so il give it ago over the next couple of days and see what i get..no doubt will be back for some help

thanks alot for everyones help

robin

If you want refelctions and refractions to work properly you need some thing to reflect and refract from, if youve not got one the light rays reflect into infinity and therefore show no reflections.

So when youve done you I glass tutorial you need to have some sort of environment, this might be a HDR, Std image etc etc

Here you go, some material settings for you.

And the resulting render, using a HDR image for the environment, rendered in mental ray with final gathering only (no GI or caustics)

Its only a quick 10 min model, set up and render demo so you might be best off playing with the material settings, I also added a sampler info node connected to a ramp to control the reflectivity (so it gets more reflective as the material moves away from the camera)

Hope it helps