That's a boatload of questions. 
1. Your glass - I would just build it as a thin piece above the rest just for the fact that I like building things as separate elements for organization and easy editing's sake. That being said, I'd build the shape of the watch's body, then the face, then the glass, then the chain, etc. Lots of ways to do it but what comes to mind initially scaling down a NURBS sphere and detaching a surface for the face (make sure keep original is unchecked). Then, I'd use a NURBS circle with a planar trim for the face or even easier, select the top isoparm of the body and edit curves -->duplicate surface curves and make it planar. For the numbers and tick marks, you could use maya's text tool for the numbers and simply create planes and duplicate them for the ticks or use Illustrator or Photoshop to create a texture map. Seems like it would be easier to figure out in maya, though. For the glass, I would use the detached top from the original squashed sphere, shade it, and re-attach it.
2. Numbers - see #1 above.
3. Casing - Do a search around the web for maya shaders...you're bound to find some good metallic ones such as pixho's. If you download someone else's shader, don't just use it...deconstruct and learn from it. Look at the graph network of the shader in your hypershade and see how it was created, the material settings, etc.
4. Lighting - Subnurbs is on the right track with his suggestion. Start out with 3-point lighting (a main light, a fill light, and a backlight). Try a couple of spots for the main and fill and a direct light for the backlight. Play around with intensities, penumbra angles, etc. There's a video tutorial here at SM in the VIP section (subscriber-only) that will get you on the right path. Otherwise, google is your friend.
5. Shadows - If you're using depth map shadows, in the light's attribute editor, open the shadows tab and make sure 'use depth map shadows' is checked and on. Look at the Dmap resolution...increasing it will give you smoother shadows. Try 512 or 1024. Or, you could use a smaller Dmap like 128 and increase the Dmap filter size to 3 or 4. This may slow your renders down a bit.
If you're using Raytraced shadows, play with the light radius and shadowrays (i.e., increase both of them a bit).
Man, I feel like I just wrote a book. Anyway, hope this helped some or sparked some ideas. Oh, and btw, if you decide to animate the watch afterwards Alias|Wavefront has a tut here.
"Terminat Bora Diem, Terminal Auctor opus."
Last edited by NitroLiq; 14-02-2003 at 07:34 PM.
