Need a "road map" for creating soap bubble textures

I want to render soap bubbles, balloons, crystal balls and other shiny orbs in a 3D modeling program, save the texture, and wrap it around a sphere in 2nd life, with the goal of creating hyperrealistic spheroids complete with refraction, caustics, reflection, and so forth.

I tried a couple approaches in 2D applications before I arrived at this. One approach I tried was photosourcing from real images of balloons and soap bubbles, and converting between polar and cartesian coordinates. It works well, but because the source only shows one side of the spheroid when I put it onto a Second Life sphere its slightly distorted and doesn't quite have the right look. I also tried a trick I found of applying lens flares and spotlights on a black or medium gray solid texture and converting to polar coordinates, and while that gives some excellent results I just want to take it to a higher level - rendering realistic spheres and crunching out the appropriate "dance of light".

Problem is, while I'm decent with GIMP and 2D stuff, I'm really new at 3D. I'm willing to do the requisite "read the fine manual" and I'm not horribly scared of complex interfaces, but I'd like to save some time and not go down paths I don't immediately need to know about for my specific task.

So ... just tell me what I need to do in general terms, what you can say in English without having to dive into the books and I'll sit down with the software and figure it out...I'd also need some suggestions on the kind of numeric ranges would be good when creating textures and materials, ala "texture should be transparent but can't be 100% transparent". Ideally someone would have a crystal sphere .obj file I can play with to try out different settings, but I'd only want it if its already sitting around on a hard drive somewhere.

For cost, I'd like to keep it to free software, but am willing to put out a bit of money if it's a real help.

for doing it in 3d software, you are gonna have to do a lot of playing and test renders to get it right.

but basically, you make the texture with say about 85% transparency, shiny with refraction. I wouldn't bother with reflections to much, as they will just look wrong, you just want the light highlights reflecting off it

One thing to keep in mind, before you even think about software, is that the question of what is being reflected is far more important than just how to make a reflection. You won't be able to make just a generic "reflective" texture, and expect it to look good in any environment besides the one in which it was generated.

In other words, a crystal ball sitting on a fortune teller's table could appear to have incredibly realistic reflections and refractions in it, if the whole room were baked well. But take that same crystal ball and throw it on the lawn outside, and it will look horrible, not reflective or refractive at all, nothing more than a weird collection of colors that don't make any sense.

Context is the key to making reflections and refractions work. The actual "reflective/refractive" texture is only a small part of the equation.

As for the how-to's, you've got your work cut out for you. Whatever your 3D application(s) of choice turns out to be, you've got four big subjects to learn: modeling, materials & texturing, lighting, and rendering. Don't expect to pull this off overnight. What you're looking to do is not at all beginner level stuff. It's going to take patience and dedication to get to the requisite level.

I'm not really a great texturer.

Perhaps because of that, the approach I'd take is to buy a set of Photoshop brushes (Photoshop being my 2D application of choice) to create the bubbles.

I don't remember whether Photoshop brushes are compatible with GIMP, or it's PSP brushes that are compatible with GIMP, but it's usually easy to find brush sets for either.

Going that route costs you money (unless you can find some free Photoshop brushes for bubbles). But paying 5 bucks for a good set of brushes seems to be worth it, compared to some of the time-consuming methods you've described for creating your own.

Edit: Did you try searching for bubble tutorials for GIMP. I did a quick search and found one at the top of my searches. (http://www.allanne.com/glass-bubble-tutorial) It's not specifically a GIMP tutorial, but the author says it's adaptable to another program like GIMP. You might find more in a web search.