I did not want to model the ornaments directly on the glasses to have more control and also to have the chance to try out different ornaments.

I used a standard glass VRay material for the shader, so nothing special there. Even the IOR of the material was not specific for glass. This was so I could have a fast rendering time (Fig.06)!


Now I came to the ornament part. I did some research on the internet for ornaments and floral shapes and I found this image (Fig.07).


There was no need to do any color corrections or b/w image changes because I did not want sharp edges. I thought it would look much better to have some softer edges that mixed together. So I put the image in the bump slot of my glass material and set the amount to 10. That gave me the best result for the ornaments (Fig.08).



For the glasses I just used a simple cylindrical UVW map (Fig.09).


Now that the glasses were done and the material, as simple as it was, was done too, I was able to start on the lighting. I wanted a photo-real lighting setup so I decided to use an HDR image for the reflection and lighting. I used a free HDRI map that I'd found somewhere on the internet (Fig.10).



I rotated the map about 355 degrees horizontal to get the light from the best location. Here I tried some different rotations with test renderings so that I could get the perfect result. There was no need to put the map in a VRay environment slot, because I wanted to render everything in one pass. I did not any extra lighting or highlights in the scene.

Next I set the depth of field for the camera. I used a standard Max camera and the DoF of the VRay render dialog. I set the aperture to .012m and got the rest from the camera. To get the typical product shot settings I used an almost telephoto lens of 180 mm (Fig.11).