Greets,

I can get a decent basic look to each of these, but nothing spectacular. What I need is help refining these.

For glass, the tough part seems to be actually making it look thicker than paper or plastic. The shape of the prop seems to have a significant impact as well (eg, a sphere is much easier to get right than a cylinder).

For smoke (not fog), the tough part seems to be edges where the texture tends to "cloud up," and outline the prop. Thinking that refining the texture here is the solution; I want small tufts of smoke so making the prop overscaled won't help.

For paper, the issue is similar to glass. It just looks impossibly thin and, even with wave deformations, unnatural. Thinking the solution here is morphing it plus a combination of a slight bump map.

Can someone point me at some tutorials, settings, or textures that would help out? "Go out and buy Poser5" isn't a solution, by the way. :: I'm also thinking that making some custom props of specific shape for all of these (glass with thickness, smoke-shaped balls, and curled paper with a smidge of thickness) is a potential solution, but before I go to that effort, I figured I'd toss it to the peanut gallery.

Thanks,

Kep

over in RDNA they have a cylco back drop that has multilayers that you can get a realllllllly nice smokey foggy effect with. and it is free. {I personally love the spooky fog look as it is whispy and soft looking} with a transparency map it can be made to look even softer and as you are working with five different layers you can make the "smoke" surround your charecter. as for the glass and paper..no clue sorry

The only thing I can think of for glass and paper is to give them some real thickness in a modelling programme.