Ok I know you guys are getting sick of me but I’m getting closer here. Got a pretty good glass going. Now I’m noticing an issue were inside the glass is grainy. Is that the transmission? Here’s an image to help you see what I’m talking about. 2500 samples. I don’t plan on using more than 500 samples as this is a tutorial on making a video. I’ll explain that more samples is better, but I don’t want to scare ppl off when they try and do this at home on a dell.
maybe russian roulette noise, try to re-render with “min bounces” = “max bounces” in every class of rays (transparent, transmission, diffusion, everything).
I don’t plan on using more than 500 samples
that very optimistic and work only on very limited secial crafted scenes (think 99% of pixels are direct light only or metal shiny figure with HDR background). Real scenes require much more samples. If you have trouble with that, get renderfarm or stop use monte carlo based renderer, as you will waste time for not related to art things.
Here is my test, rendered with 1 area lamp, a beveled cube on a plane, and 1 HDRi lamp.
Edit: Lol a bit late, I should try refreshing before posting next time! 
Great job zeealpal. Your cube looks great. I’d be happy with that.
The reason I’m shooting for 500 or less samples is simple really. It’s video. at 24fps you don’t notice the noise in anything that is moving. So I just need to make sure that my background is noise free. You can never sample any image enough. But in the real world you have to look at what your goals are and split the difference. You have to decide how much time you can and are willing to spend on any given project. This whole thing is for a tutorial for ppl that don’t know how to use dynamic paint to effect waves in a glass material. It’s not a tutorial for MGM or Miramax. I want the ppl that follow my tutorial to be able to render it out on any computer in a reasonable amount of time and still be able to wow their friends. If they go to following me and begin rendering and the first frame takes 3 hours to render they are going to vomit all over their keyboard and likely uninstall blender and never attempt it again believing that only a super computer is capable of doing what I’m teaching. No image. No video is ever perfect. I was planning on using shapekeys to animate a money spitting glowing pickles at this glass cube, so lets not go over board on what is realistic and what isn’t. mkay? lol
Thanks IkariShinji and all you guys for your help. I used to hate this forum when I was starting out, but I think some really talented and helpful ppl have joined since then. There have always been talented helpful ppl in this forum, but too few in the past. Great work guys. This is what open source is all about.
Who F N knew a glass cube would be so hard? Reminds me of carpenters who are hiring testing their employees by asking them to build a box out of wood. You’d be surprised how few ppl calling themselves carpenters can build a simple box.
Ok, so seeing as how difficult it is to do such a fundamental thing like light a glass cube, I’ve decided to do a tutorial on this as well. I’ve learned a lot in this thread and feel pretty confident in muddleing through the process, but I’m still not as good as some of you I suspect. Maybe you guys could post a quick list of things to remember when doing this. Ahh come on. It’ll be good for you to list em out.
Hey, glad you like my image 
The HDRi I used is studio0001small.hdr from this pack here: http://zbyg.deviantart.com/art/HDRi-Pack-1-97402522
My area lamp was just balanced until I liked the lighting, here is a screenshot of how it was setup:
