Thanx Zero and Turbo.

The pen was just something nice and simple to get a feel for caustics and the rest of it. I'm sure I've still got the refraction index wrong for the plastic - I'm sure that's one of the things that make these pens stand apat from imitations, and that gives it the look that earned it the name Crystal..

The materials are all really simple.

The Ball is a phonge, the brass bit is too. The blue plastic that holds the nib assembly as well as the ink are both phongs. While the inktube and the case are a dialetric_material.

Not exactly photo quality, but I did manage to trick the only person I showed it to, when shown an a 40 inch tv screen. Ha ha. Really gotta spend more time on the dialetric material and the rendering settings though.

Here, I've included the whole scene file for the biro. .mb and .ma for anyone using a version under 7.0 - standard thing, just change the first couple of lines at the top of the file that mention Maya 7.0..

Simon.