Hello all! I’ve been fooling around with Blender for a little more than a month, and I’m liking it more every time I open it. This is one of the only images I’m happy with, so I’d like to see what you think of it. 
Criticism is appreciated!
One question: How can I get refracted light from the glass to land on the table?
Thanks a bunch!
–Colin
Did you set the IOR??
One nit to be picked, why is the table set the way it is. Usually, a table either sets flush in the corner or is set diagonally across the corner.
Althiom, the picker of nits
I’ve seen desks like that, most people set them that way because they want a trash can next to it.
Good modelling though, Very high class, like something you would find in a mansion in the mountains.
Yup, the IOR was set to 1.18. Shouldn’t that do it?
Hmm, a trashcan! Good idea. 
I think maybe I’ll rotate the desk a little more out, so it doesn’t look as weird…
I like the like your lighting and the scene in general. Adding the refraction for the glass would be a nice touch.
I think the carpet looks flat, flat like a tiled floor, though and I might make the colors less distinct. Looks like there might be too much specularity on it too, either that or the light shining in is very bright. Its not that the carpet is awful, its just what I keyed in on looking at the image critically.
Thanks! Do you know how I could add the refraction? I’ve already got some… but it doesn’t affect the light coming down from the window.
The carpet texture was my first attempt at UV mapping… selecting the bottom face of a cube. There are now two textures on the cube-- and one is applied to one face only. I’m a little confused on how to change the settings for the texture, cause I can’t see it in the list of textures.
What I’ll probably do is just replace that face with a plane. Is that the best way to do this?
–Colin
Here’s a bunch of IOR’s as defined by POVRAY. Pick one and then play around with it.
Air_Ior = 1.000292
Amethyst_Ior = 1.550
Apatite_Ior = 1.635
Aquamarine_Ior = 1.575
Beryl_Ior = 1.575
Citrine_Ior = 1.550
Crown_Glass_Ior = 1.51
Corundum_Ior = 1.765
Diamond_Ior = 2.47
Emerald_Ior = 1.575
Flint_Glass_Ior = 1.71
Flint_Glass_Heavy_Ior = 1.8
Flint_Glass_Medium_Ior = 1.63
Flint_Glass_Light_Ior = 1.6
Fluorite_Ior = 1.434
Gypsum_Ior = 1.525
Ice_Ior = 1.31
Plexiglas_Ior = 1.5
Quartz_Ior = 1.550
Quartz_Glass_Ior = 1.458
Ruby_Ior = 1.765
Salt_Ior = 1.544
Sapphire_Ior = 1.765
Topaz_Ior = 1.620
Tourmaline_Ior = 1.650
Water_Ior = 1.33
Althiom, the picker of nits
There’s really no difference between using a plane or the bottom face of your cube. Both are going to provide you a face to assign a material to.
You said you UV mapped it, but can’t see the Texture. From this short description, I assume that the way you’re getting the carpet colors in the render then is that you chose TexFace in the material.
If my assumption is correct, then you have the same confusion I originally had when I started doing this. UV mapping and materials are not directly connected, other than through that TexFace button. Actually, the UV coordinates aren’t even related to a particular image as they run from 0.0 to 1.0 in the X and Y directions. All you are doing when you UV map is setting up a mapping from the vertices in your mesh to the proportional X and Y coordinates of the image.
Its perfectly reasonable and sometimes desireable to UV map to one image and then never use the image in rendering or use a different one. Heck, you don’t even have to have an image to do your UV mapping, just move the vertices around in the blank UV/Image Editor window.
If you want to use an image in the materials, add a new Texture to the Material and set that Texture to Image and assign your desired image to that Texture. Make sure you set the mapping for the image Texture to UV in the top of the Map Input panel.
You could bump map your carpet by taking the carpet image into your favorite image processing program, I use gimp, and molesting it there. You may get ok results just using the image as a bump map (Nor/Normal map in blender), but processing it some will likely give better results. Your mapping for this should also be UV, but in the Map To panel select Nor and make sure Col is off if you’re using different image for color and bump/norm mapping.
Thanks althiom! Those are very useful. The glass is looking better, BUT it still doesn’t distort the light that falls on the table. Any ideas?
zaz, thanks a lot for clearing that up for me. Yes, you were right, I used the TexFace button. I understand everything you said. When I followed the instructions, though, the carpet texture also ran up the walls. The floor texture was at the correct scale (because of the UV coordinates I specified), and the ones on the wall were huge. How do I make the texture apply only to the floor?
–Colin
Your first source of information should always be the docs. If that doesn’t work, then tutorials and/or asking here. I think the docs have a pretty good description of this, but I haven’t looked at that part for quite awhile.
I don’t mean to chastise you, I’m only trying to enable you and let you know where to find information if you didn’t know about the source(s). The guys have put together some pretty good documentation, although there are holes in it yet. Getting familar with the documentation and looking at tutorials will teach you stuff you’d never think of asking.
Bunch of tutorials here. I think the one about Materials Indices should answer your question. All of those are for the old interface though, but its not hard to figure out what they’re talking about.
In a nutshell, you need to assign another material to your cube and then arrange so the different faces of the cube get the proper material.
In the Links and Materials panel under F9, click New to make a new material. The slider above the New button there and the slider by the Mesh name in the Materials panel under F5 cycle through the materials on the active object.
You assign materials to faces in edit mode on the object. If the carpet is your first material on the cube, select all the vertices, set the slider on 2 and press Assign. You’ve just assigned the wall material to all faces. Now switch the slider to 1 and select the bottom vertices to get only the bottom face selected and press Assign. Go to F5 and setup the materials and render.
The tutorial I mention above, and others, have a much more detailed description of this process. Too long for me to copy here and too much time to setup links to screen shots, etc. Yeah, I’m lazy, :).
Thanks zaz. It’s working now. I should have less questions once my manual comes.
So now, does anybody know how to make the glass distort the LIGHT? I want to see some weird clumps of light on the table after passing through the glass. Is this possible?
–Colin
Woot!! Grats!!
Glad to help.
As far as I know, the entire issue with the glass should be handled by the ray tracing parameters, assuming you’re using a pre-release build with it enabled. I haven’t spent a lot of time with that though, but the pointers about adjusting IOR and other paramters on the Mirror Transp panel under F5 is where you should be looking.
If you’re not using blender’s ray tracing pre-releases or its just not working, check the Python and Plugins forum for the refract plugin. Its a tad complicated to get it setup to work and may or may not be worth it. It should do what you want though, or most of it at least.
Effstops wrote:
So now, does anybody know how to make the glass distort the LIGHT? I want to see some weird clumps of light on the table after passing through the glass. Is this possible?
Sounds like what you are talking about is caustics. To do this you will have to use a raytracer like Yafray. I don’t think the Blender raytracer does caustics yet although I haven’t checked the latest builds yet.
Other wise you can fake caustics by putting an image map on a lamp. I believe if you check under specials community journals at the beginning of this site you can find a tutorial by theeth on how to fake caustics with Blender.
Paradox
Well I didn’t find that tutorial where I said it was and I don’t remember where I saw it, but, here is a link to Blender Brazil which has a good example of fake caustics and refraction (top left picture)
Also if goto the home page under top 10 downloads I believe the blend file is available for download for learning purposes. It’s called reftracao or something like that.
Paradox