Okay – so for my second experiment, I decided that I wanted to learn a little about reflections and transparency. So I decided to try and create a bottle (generic type – looks a little like a milk-bottle), that was full of water, and reflected the scene around it.

I followed some very good tutorials on the Blender Wiki, which contains some great material, so kudos to the guys that write/maintain that site. It walked me through creating a glass texture, setting the right levels of reflection and transparency, and also turning on “ray-tracing” to draw the scene properly. It then walked me through setting appropriate lighting (both ambient lamps and spotlights) to effectively light the scene.

The result is below, and for my first ever attempt – I’m pretty pleased. I’m also becoming much more comfortable with all the Blender controls for panning and moving views and objects. Haven’t decided on my next project just yet – will update this post when I’ve decided…