I reproduced my glasses in carrara, trying to make them as true to life as possible. I've even got little screws here and there if you look closely.......what do you reckon? (it looks like there arnt any lenses cuz of the lights angle)

In a word, WOW! Very impressive. I even like the softly textured surface they're sitting on. My only suggestion would be to place a couple fairly low intensity lights with a gel to simulate the refraction of your source light through the lenses -- fake the caustics. The image above uses the gel (inset) on a spotlight placed just above the shadow of the lens. I think caustics like this would pop the realism even more. This could pass for a photo.

Very impressive indeed. Just do what AzChip suggested and it will be even more impressive.

Thanks for the advice AzChip Ill try that

Nice work!

Smooth! are you sure you made that in carrara?

Have you tried making the glass real glass with the refraction and seeing if Carrara would actually calculate the funky caustics? Supposedly it's supposed to be able to do that. At a minimu, you'd get the light of the arms through the glass tweaked correctly. RDS could pull that magic trick off. If you do the gel and the refraction, I agree that it would look just like a real photo. Good job for inspiring all of us!

Kixum -- I've tried to play with Carrara and "real" caustics. I was working on a magnifying glass over a book and it turned out quite weird! Unfortionately I don't think Carrara has that great of a raytracing engine...or I could have just been doing something wrong (which is probably closer to being correct!) Jared

Carrara doesn't support caustics. Eric Winemiller Digital Carvers Guild Freeware and commercial 3D extensions http://digitalcarversguild.com