I know, a stereotypical image for a newbie blender artist. I’m proud of it, so that’s all that matters, right? 
I am planning on adding water that spills out, but I’m hoping my computer can take that many vertexes (I had several crashes just modelling this).
Please be as mean as you want! (Although I wouldn’t mind a wee bit of encouragement 
)
Great work…did you use a script for the broken glass? only crit I have is to TURN DOWN THE REFLECTION! its hard to tell the shape of the glass. it just lookes like a deformed mirror. or if its not reflecting then the distortion is probably from a high IOR setting which in that case turn that down.
I guess it’s a script: it’s the Explode modifier.
Right, I didn’t use any reflection. I did use a “glare” node, though…I guess I went a little whild with it! 
Hey, don’t blame me for the high IOR. it’s 1.53 which is the average IOR of glass. You have to blame physics for that one. 
Anyway, thanks.
Good job! The ground looks pretty realistic. I agree with pefertig, the IOR is sort of messing up the glass. I’ll bet you could get away with 1.2 or something. Overall though, it’s quite nice.
It is a good start. If you want to improve it, do the following: Change the quad faces to triangles to make the edges more realistic. Add a solidify modifier to the glass for some thickness. If not already, try to use the Blinn shader for the specs and turn up the hardness and Intensity.
i think you’ve done a great job here for a newbie. don’t worry about cliches! at the moment it’s about learning skills 1.53 is the correct IOR for glass, maybe it’s just too thick?
the only thing i might suggest, is that your render looks wrong because Blender internal doesnt handle reflection and refraction terribly well.
while realistic refractions etc. are possible in blender, they are hard to acheive, so i would recommend trying an external renderer, luxrender is fun
itll give you some skills and maybe help improve your scene.
derek
Thanks for the suggestion to (1) use a Blinn shader and (2) convert quads to tris. it looks a whole lot more realistic.
I also decided to add a little lens distortion to give it a rough “in the moment” look. Do you think it adds to the image?
i think it does, some people might be opposed to the dispertion, but i quite like it as i think it partially acts as motion blur
The distortion looks pretty cool. The shards seem to be a little too thin. Try to make them thicker. If you are on 2.49b, go to
Scripts > Mesh > Solidify Selection and on 2.5x go to the Modifier tab and select Solidify. This would make the glass look less like a massive piece and the light rays would have more surfaces to pass through. ( In addition to this you also need to adjust the Depth value in the Materials/Transparency tab to 4+. The default value is 2.)
Is it supposed to be a glass? Or a hunk of glass?
I did use a solidify modifer, but I did it before the explode modifier…the might be my problem.
Ok. That is no problem. On each modifier are two arrows (up and down). You can use them to change the order (position) of the modifier. Try diffrent positions. That should fix it
I think the IOR might still be a little harsh there…
I had to start over on the glass because I foolishly applied the solidify modifier. (I applied this, too, but moved the non-applied object to another layer).
I wanted to use the “Approximate” gather method, but when I tried to do that the render evnetually crashed blender no matter what size I was rendering. I still got to do ambient occlusion, thankfully. 
What do you think of the milk? Does it look like it was in the glass?
not really tbh, i would make it a cube in the shape of the inside of the glass and animate it to drop down, if you know what i mean…
Yeah, I thought of doing it that way at first, but then I figured it would be easier (and more fun) to model it by hand. I figured since the glass isn’t already in motion, it would be awkward and difficult to use a fluid simulation. But I’ll try to do it that way.
Hey BowRing,
the modelling and the DoF are cool! The thing i miss for a still more realistic scene are the caustics on the floor. I know it’s kind of hard to get this in blender (if you walk to the luxrender you have to “retexture” the whole scene), but it would be great to have caustics in there
The shape of the fluid somehow doesn’t fit to the glass. But I like the style of the fluid object itself. Very cool result for modelling it by hand. Caustics would be nice. You could fake caustics with a spotlight and a texture… if you like:) Anyway nice improvement since your first render.
don’t start the fluid until everything else i perfect. Maybe u should have an object lfying into the milk ( but make so u can’t see it)
A project like this is really difficult. Surprisingly it slows down my system. A few times I’ve waited for about five minutes for a mesh to render after I clicked on it. My computer isn’t that slow, either.