Transparency
Transparency and light refraction within a transparent material are key parameters in order to get a realistic rendering of a material like solid glass. This tutorial doesn't help with getting caustic spots, which is beyond the reach of the actual version of Blender (v2.36) without using an external renderer like Yafray.
Reflections
In the past, Blender used EnvMaps (environmental maps) in order to simulate the reflectiveness of objects. But this way was quite difficult, needing the use of Empties (null objects) and layers when a simple reflecting plane was needed. Fortunately, including Raytracing into the renderer eased the whole process and helped to achieve a greater realism.
Material Indice
This short tutorial aims at showing you how to give many different materials to the same mesh (up to 16 different indice)
UV Mapping and Texturing
In this tutorial you will learn how to make a UV map of an object you wish to texture using Blender's 'seams' functionality. By learning how to do this correctly you can apply effective detailed textures to almost any object, ushering your work into a new level of complexity and flexibility.
Note: You will need blender v2.34 (or greater), and an image editing program like Gimp or Photoshop to attempt this tutorial.
UV Mapping
This tutorial was written for 1.8, but everything still works the same in 2.0.
Well, there might have been some confusion about the UV texturing, since Ton suggested to me today, that I should write a UV texturing tutorial :o) Here it is!
Making a Reflection
If you getting started in Blender you can probally think of a scene or two where you'd like to have reflective surfaces. As of Blender 2.32 this became very easy using the new builtin Raytracer. The raytracer gives us the tools to create realistic looking reflections, with a few simple steps.
