I had to do some experimenting to get this working, so why not share that knowledge with all of you?

Modelling

Please note that the modelling is very basic and is only used here to support the shading. It is very similar to the glass modelling on the assistant site

1. Draw a curve that will outline ( in this case ) the bottle
2. give the bottle a thickness by offsetting the curve by -0.5 or so
3. select both curves and revolve (cfr. bottle1)botlle_1.zip<\/a>

Shading

for shading I used a layered shader with the phong glass in one layer and a lambert in another. I'll elaborate....

1. create a layered shader
2. create a phong glass shader - there are some on the assist site, but if you mess around with the transparency and the refracion of a phong (E) you can make any glass you want, and after some cursing you will learn more from that ;-)
3. If your label (the paper you want to add to the bottle) has no alpha channel, add one in photoshop. The alpha channel will be used to mask the transparecny, so just add a black channel to your image and save as .tif
4. map the tif on the color of a lambert and connect the out alpha to the RGB of the transparency. You do that by shift + MMB it over the lambert icon or by opening the connection editor)(take a look at the hypergraph)botlle_2.zip<\/a>
5. open up the layered shader and drag the phong and lambert in the swatches
6. in the place2d node of the file texture, mess around with the interactive placement and scale your label as you want (use the MMB)
7. assign the shader to the bottle

Rendering

1. add some light to your scene
2. tick on raytracing in your main light
3. tick on raytracing in your render globals
4. render away

take a look at the rudimentary final rendering, pretty crappy, but you'll get the idea. final.zip<\/a>

As in all 3D, it takes a lot of tweeking and messing around to get the desired look. So, get a cup of coffee and start sliding those sliders... If you have questions or remarks, drop me a line at kmannens@aw.sgi.com