Wasn't it Laurent Duperval who wrote:
>I'm seeing a few problems:
>
>- I don't see the sphere at all (with the phong). I basically just see a
>clipped circle with the picture

Instead of a simple intersection, I think you want something like this:

#declare alekoBall = union {
  object {redBall}
  intersection {
    object{alekoFrame}
    object {redBall}
  }
}


>- My picture appears four times, I guess once for each 1x1x1 box. How do I
>make it appear once, but take up all the space of the box? And I only want
>it on one side of the box.

As you surmised, one copy of the image fills the region between <0,0>
and <1,1> whereas you probably want it to fill the region between
<-1,-1> and <1,1>. You can translate and scale it like this:-

        pigment{
            image_map{
                png "aleko.png"
            }
            translate <-0.5,-0.5,0>
            scale 2
        }

>- My picture appears speckled. I'm not sure what that's all about. By
>speckled, I mean that it looks like a bunch of random pixels have been
>removed from the picture.

Try adding "interpolate 2"

        pigment{
            image_map{
                png "aleko.png"
                interpolate 2
            }
            translate <-0.5,-0.5,0>
            scale 2
        }

>
>- My ball doesn't seem very 3D-ish and neither does it look very
>see-through... I see that changing ambient to 0 gives a better spheric look
>to the ball. But still not very see-through-ish. Maybe I need to put some
>kind of textured background to get the effect I want. I'll look into that.
>I see that using rgbf instead of rgbt helps also.

I'm not sure what sort of look you're aiming for, but it might be worth
trying some of the glass finishes and interiors from glass.inc

#include "glass.inc"
#declare redBall =
sphere {
    <0,0,0>,1
    pigment {
        color rgbt <1,0,0,0.5>
    }
    finish{F_Glass7}
    interior {I_Glass4}
}

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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