Refraction effect buttons - RealWorld forums

Hi, I am trying to create a theme with a refraction effect for PocketPCs.

The look I am trying to acheive is that of a flat surface with a texture (ie the background desktop image) with glass buttons on top of it.

The buttons are rounded, and refract the background underneath. Now due to the way the theme software works that I am using, you will always know which part of the background is under any given icon, so you can "Prefract" the background as part of the icon - no need to do real-time refraction on a phone...

As an example, please consider this image:
http://www.unleash.com/jeffh/glassbutton/fisheye.jpg

This is done using a trick, with corel draw, but the idea I am after is the same - the background gets refracted, but the icon image (The word "Refract" in this case) is not messed with.

I was wondering how possible this would be with this software - I had a little play and managed to create a rounded cube for the button, but the quality (ie number of polygons) of the rounded cube was awful - it hardly looked rounded at all.
Then I faced issues getting a background in, I added a NURBS flat surface and assigned a texture to that, but I am not sure how I would get the exact positioning I am required for the multiple buttons.

Any ideas or comments gratefully received...

You can see what my theme looks like here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=2295653
I am trying to get the top glassy buttons to refract the background...

The rounded cube uses low polygon count and as you have found out yourself is not suitable for this task, where precision matters.

It would be best to use NURBS surface for the button (here is one). When rendering to image, you can increase the LOD level in the renderer settings.

For the positioning, it may help to enable grid or zoom in/out.