Cycles Vase

Description:

This is a vase made in cycles. It's fairly simple, I made it mostly to showcase what cycles can do. To use this blend you need a blender build with cycles which you can get from graphicall.org.

Here's a quick explanation of the material node tree for the vase:

Glass BSDF: Since cycles is a physically based renderer, you need to select a shader suitable for that object and then mix them with another shader if necessary. This vase is glass so I just used the Glass BSDF shader.

Fresnel: Fresnel makes up the slight solidity visible on the edges of the vase. It kind of replicates the 'thickness' effect when you look at glass that is thicker in one area than another (I think).

Mix Shader: This is pretty self-explanatory, it mixes different shaders and you can control the amount of mixing.

Material Output: The finished product.

The plane's around the vase have a emission material assigned to them so they emit light just like a lamp.