Stained Glass

I'm a newbie to 3D graphics and animation but I'm learning quickly....I think. I've learned some animation, a lot of design and building, some lighting and what not and some other shit that would be boring to anyone who wasn't doing it themselves. One of the reasons I'm learning so fast (actually probably the whole reason) is that I have Tabulanis right at hand. I'd give my left foot for a direct connection into his brain. Screw tutorials, help files and learning curves; plug me into Tab and I got it all worked out. (If you don't know who Tab is, you can see what he does at www.frogfaith.com/tabulanis )
Usually when I work on a project, he likes to let me go on my own until I hit a brick wall and then he'll come in, but he likes to let me see if I can figure it all out first, though my stuff wouldn't look half as good if he weren't around.
So I feel kinda good about my half win today. Tab was out all day working (modeling as an old man if you believe it), so I was on my own.
I made a pretty cool looking room (the ball is just there for...well for now), but I wanted to make stained glass windows for it. This will all be used for a music video where I paint this world into existence and then things are animated in it(so we're also talking green screen). The point was to show off my art too, but I kinda forgot about that because final renderer made everything look so good anyway, my brain no longer thought it needed a bunch of arty stuff all over it. To fix that, I decided to start by making the windows at the back of the room stained glass versions of three of my Chinese zodiac tarot card series...but I've never done stained glass before. This isn't brilliant stuff, but I looked at no help file, tutorial or forum for this...which is probably also why it's just a half win.
It's pretty simple. I did a new layer in photoshop, tracing my painting to create the in between lines, used it as my bump layer and minussed the fuck out of it (cause it's black and not white), and then tried to make the painting look as glassy as possible.If you can't tell, there's a pyramid, a sphere and something else like a donut behind the glass...though because you can't tell goes to show how "glass like" it isn't.
Tab tells me that it was a nifty idea but I have brought it to the farthest point it can go with this technique, and that I can't actually get the light to go through the glass and project on the floor....oh! that's it! I need to project the image with a light onto the window and then it will spill through perfectly, and I'll just throw on the bump layer...and bam! I think that will work!
I could be wrong, but it's so much nicer trying to figure things out without a tutorial...I seem to be slowly working past that.

After asking him:
He tells me that would work but there is a better way.