alienretro

Try to remove the Tablet PC components of the Windows. You can achieve that by going to Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn Windows Features On/Off.

You can paint the variation in the texture, you can Mix (the material) VrayDirt with the base material to get some variation. For the soft feel, you just need to use the Falloff map and adjust the curve. Take a look at the Fabric video of the Viscorbel V-Ray Materials Explained, it should be a great help.

Yes, the shell modifier does make the difference. There is not a single object that is a infinitely thin surface. Some people create window glass using a plane, for example, but that is just wrong, refraction will just not work properly, it needs to have thickness, making a box the best option. The same apply for your plastic torus.

Here's a IOR table: http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-513458.html Setting the IOR right is pretty important to get the right look. The IOR determine how light will bend when it goes into that surface. http://viscorbel.com/vray-materials/ On this link, he talks about the fresnel effect. If the material is refractive I keep the Fresnel IOR locked and set the IOR only on refraction, only unlocking the Fresnel IOR if I need some finer control (sometimes being "physically accurate" isn't the best thing). If the material is not reflective, I just unlock it and put the value there. And... you know, go out there. Look, see, make some observations, try to create the material only in your mind while looking at it.

As I was slowly getting into this whole shader (or material) thing, I've realized that a whole better aproach to create a realistic material was to think about the surface I was trying to recreate as well. I have a set of questions that I ask myself that I'll try to share here. A observation before I start: always have some reference pictures of the material you're trying to recreate. Your memory of the material is not enough, go on google images and search some good pictures to look at while tweaking it. If you get it wrong, other people will notice, so look at the reference! 1) What kind of surface it is ? What is the diffuse color ? Is it reflective ? How much reflective (reflection value) ? 2) How does it reflect the light ? Is it sharp as a mirror or is it a more blurred reflection ? Does the surface has fresnel reflections ? Most surfaces, except metals have fresnel. Set the Fresnel IOR properly. Remember anisostropy when simulating metal. 3) Are the reflections colored ? (case of most metals). 4) Does it refract light ? Is it transparent, somehow ? If so, how much light does it refract and what's the IOR for that material ? (There's IOR's list all over the internet). You can have a colored refracted material by playing Fog Color and Fog Bias. 5) Usually there are two types of detail in the bump. The high frequency detail and the low frequency. You usually want to use a bump map to simulate the low frequency detail, the small bumps and wrinkles in the surface. For the high frequency detail (deformations that occurs all along the surface) you may want to mix your bump map with a noise map. That noise map has the effect of warping the surface just a little to give a realistic effect. After all, it's very rare that a surface it's perfectly straight in the real world. And that affects reflection a lot. 6) Last, but not least, you gotta think about the translucence of your material. Think about a leaf and how light shines through it. For that, you can use VrayFastSSS2. 7) VrayBlendMtl is a great tool to achieve realism. So, that's my workflow. I see that you got it all right for the basic maps, I'm just talking about my general process of seeing the world before recreating that world. Hope it helps.

If you're not using VrayPhysicalCam, then you'll want to drop the Sun intensity to something more manageable like 0.1.

Cebas stairMAX.

Not quite sure what you want, but a basic glass material should consist of a black diffuse color (not entirely black, mind you), light grey in reflection color, check fresnel reflections, set refraction to something pretty close to white, perhaps 220 and check affect shadows. That should give you a nice glass material right from the beginning.