Dave, Posted a couple more shots that might be helpful. chuck.

Room Test 3B - This is the same "room" from the earlier post. Added a sliding door , tacky picture on wall , carpet and drape. Light in the room is an invisible emitter, power set to 80.000 . The out side view is a pic applied to a rectangle the size of the sliding door applied as a texture. I gave it the property of an emitter , power of 100.000 . I think the balance of light in the room versus the brightness of the outside image is pretty good. You have to be careful if you set the image pasted against a door or window you can "blow" it out if you run the power to high. Saved the image at 2.4 exposure and 0.900 gamma.

Fruit stuff - This was a quick render I did after modeling the objects in the scene. I've gotten in the habit of doing quick test shots of models just to check out how the model is going to look. Are round objects really smooth, did I choose good colors, that sort of thing. It's good practice for getting comfortable with using the various tools in TW.

pretty cool Mr. Dave. got to agree with pbacot there is something creepy about the legs. think it may be the shape of the "knee"and man o man you've got some great textures

hvanessen , yes you are improving. what will help a lot is make your glass thinner. the base and "bowl" of the glass is still very thick. to look like real life the glass has to be as thin as a real glass. keep practicing you will keep getting better.

thanks for the thumb HornOxx. Yeah between liking to fly fish and my weird job I know a little too much about fish I think.....

thanks hellnbak. I'd rather call them dinner..........

Fantastic, Amazing, Spectacular I'd give you more thumbs up but I've only got 2. I now bow to a true master . Simply incredible.

Dave, You are going to get so sick of me ! The last pic I posted I new was pretty dark. It was on purpose. I was hoping you would pick up on how stark the shadows were. Shadows from sun settings are a lot stronger than shadows in most interior spaces. Posted two more quick tests, scene the same as the last.

room test 09 - Fully enclosed room. Light emitter at ceiling, 2' smaller on all sides. Lowered 8" below actual ceiling. RGB of emitter 255/214/170. Rendered on 09 interior progressive. 10 passes, 14:20 minutes . Exposure set to 1200 in post pro before saving.

room test 09 2 - Same room but added 6' sliding door in wall to left of scene. Set a light emitter outside of door. Left RGB at default 255/255/255. Power 200,000 . 4 point lights in room, two spaced out over chairs. Two at other end of room, behind camera view. Lights over chairs radius 4 , strength 0.6 . Lights behind camera radius 3 , strength 0.8 . All point lights RGB 255/214/170 . Rendered 09 interior progressive, 15 passes , 27:46 minutes. Saved at 1400 exposure.

The first render could have run another 10 passes. My experience has been after 25 passes you really don't see improvement when your using low resolution textures.

Second render would definitely benefit from some more passes . Image would sharpen up. Added the the door to pick up natural side light that would highlight stuff on table.

You can have those wood textures ,floor and furniture. They are available as texture packs in the sketchUcation store. The fabric on the chair cushion is another texture pack same place . They are low res. NPR textures , but still look real good for the work I do.

Dave, Not sure how you set up your room, guess I should have asked. Being as you use a Hemispherical Sky setting I guessed you used some kind of open box for your "room". Posting a pic of a quick shot to try an emulate what you were trying. Doing an interior this way is totally different than what I'm used to. 98% of the renders I'm doing for job are interior shots. The spaces are fully modeled and lit with light emitting panels. Works well for the crazy stuff I'm doing.

That said I through together 2 walls and a floor , slammed chairs , table and booze in the corner. Used Hemispherical Sky setting. What I did do was turn on shadows in SU and adjust the settings until shadows had very little rake. Did test renders on low and played with sun TW sun settings until I got something reasonable.

The posted pic had Brightness - 0.6 , Haze - 30 , Sun Strength - 2.0 . Also gave the sun the RGB value of a tungsten light bulb.

For me I'd rather set up an enclosed room and use point lights , spot lights, emitters or a combo of the same for doing interiors. F.Y.I. setting up and running the test took maybe 15 - 20 minutes tops.

Dave, What was your light set up ? You can get conflicting, multiple shadow effect if there is multiple light sources. Depends on light placement and power. Curious , what setting did you render at ? chuck.

Bryan, thank you.

, Each one of your shots gets better than the last. Keep it up

Needed to make a "Jack" model for my work. Couldn't help myself had to make a little school of them and do a quick render.

Thank you thank you thank.... spent a couple of nights trying to come up with a good looking ice cube. Your's are much much better.

Thanks pbacot , it's kind of fun trying new stuff even if your not getting the result you want. Totally understand your comment about artists painting glass objects. Have an art background. I have to tip my hat to the guys that write the render software. When I think about the way light bounces and bends going through bottles and such. I'm guessing calculating the light paths through curved glass is one of the toughest on the software. Makes my head hurt thinking about it.

Dave , don't get discouraged. You are making progress. Heck I never need to do this sort of stuff for my job but learning new stuff is a good thing. You never know when it might come in handy. Just keep swinging at the pitches. chuck.

Dave, Didn't think you were mad. Figure at some point you think " oh good gosh now what" when you see my post .Several of us have hammered at you about the thickness of the glass in your glass. I thought i show you a side by side comparison . Posting at pic of your glass ( left side of pic ) next to one I cleaned up a little. Want you to see just how much a difference the small stuff makes.

I made the following changes to your glass - reduced thickness of glass by 2/3's. Used a 48 segment circle for follow me path. Added a small 3 sided radius to top edge of glass. Added radius to the square corners in the stem. Gave the bottom of of the foot a smoother curve. Probably took about 15 minutes.

Render set up - Put both glasses on a "table" inside a room. The room is a half circle. Already had one set up for some other tests. Used a combination of point lights and one spotlight. Point lights given RGB value of 100 watt light bulb. Spotlight was set to front left of table to aimed to glasses. Gave it RGB of a halogen bulb.

Spent maybe 15 minute doing quick tests to adjust power levels of lights. Rendered on 10 interior plus. Let it run 55 passes. I think the difference is pretty obvious. Check out how distorted the reflections in the thick glass are. Wouldn't matter how long it ran the result wouldn't be so good.

The renders far from perfect even on the thin glass. I do think it shows that time spent on the small details will give good rewards.

Dave, Don't hate me. Was a little distracted when I posted earlier. Your glass is still way to thick. Went back into model and looked again. The thickness needs to be reduced by easily 2/3 s it's current thickness. The reflections in glass are a result of good models good light set up and good materials. If you provide the "right stuff" Twilight will give you all the reflections you'll ever want. I've got a scene set up now that I've been pulling test shots off of. Have it about ready to let it run overnight. I'll post some images when I get it done. Regards, Chuck.

Dave, Much better. Downloaded and took a look. There was only a few minor issues. Biggest was glass on the left had the wine and glass in separate groups. If you had tried a render you'd have got weird look to the wine. Exploded both groups and then regrouped and everything was fine. What happens is the inside faces of the glass are in the same physical space as the outside of the wine . It will drive SU & TW crazy as 2 faces can't occupy the same space. Easiest way to recognize it is when you rotate the model you will see weird flashing effects on the faces that are flat against each other. You had a few edges that needed soft/smooth and there were 2 unwanted cylinders inside the stems on the center and right side glass. A left over from the follow me. Sometimes that happens depending on the shape your making.

Scaled the glasses down , checked the TW settings and ran a quick render that I've posted. The big plug in the back is one of the left over pieces of geometry from a glass stem , I didn't scale it down .The only things I changed in your TW settings were as follows.

You had 2 different color set ups for your glass. Deleted on and repainted one glass so they both have matching materials. Changed the channels from " sketchup" to "color" and set the alpha to 3 . Set your red color to channel also and set the alpha to 4.Ran the render on easy-medium, took 17 sec. Not bad. The funky look in the bottom of the center glass is my fault. I soft/smooth'ed the bottom edge inside and out. I was curious what would happen. If those edges were unsoftened the bottom of the glass would probably look better. So much for experiments! Keep it up your making good progress.

Box, a double DUH! from me as I slam my head on the desk repeatedly !

pbacot , I think you've hit on something. Should speed up the process. I pretty much stuck with the way massimo illustrated as it's my first tries at this liquid in a glass business. The moving the liquid in and out wasn't a real big deal worked big and used a couple of guides. Will have to try your approach. thanks, chuck.