Quote - Here is a render of a Wonderous Wares vase.  I set the gain at 2.  I also found out I had to use an HDRI in the place of the skydome that the vases came with. I used an IBL that came with Reality. 

Two things:  What if I didn't want a picture of a swimming pool or anything else like that in my scene? 

                     The vase is still black. 

Good thing it's not real or I might break it.  Not really, but I am frustrated.  Mostly at my ignorance.  Any suggestions?

 

You shouldn't be having so much problem with glass, it's so easy in Reality.

Why don't you start by importing the obj of that bottle instead of loading it as a prop. This way we have no texture or anything else loading with it, so we will see if its the geometry or the supplied textures that are not right.

Make a plane for the floor, make another plane rotated 90 degree as a back wall. Position your bottle in front of that wall but not touching it. Put one of Reality's mesh lights in the scene, not too close to the bottle a little higher than the model and rotated towards it, imagine you are in photo studio.

Don't assign any textures in Studio. Call up Reality.

Assign a white matte material for the two planes. Select the vase and assign the glass material, white diffusion, white transmission, select an index of refraction for glass from the drop-down menu, select hyper-realistic. This will give us a regular plain glass look.

In the camera settings, ISO 125, Shutter speed 1/4  f/stop 5.6

Lights, leave the mesh light as is, plug in an IBL light, I personally prefer the spherical ones this will give us the nice reflections in the glass.

Hit render, and let's see what you get.

Dominique Digital Cats Media