Animated glass orb - made in Blender using an artificial HDRI, boolean operations and the compositor

Blue Glass Orb from Thomas Goodwin on Vimeo.

This is an experiment I did in Blender. Most of the effect comes from using a spherical high-resolution image called an HDRI as a light source for the scene. I created the HDRI in Blender separately and then tried to design a model that interacted with and reflected the background in an interesting way.

In addition to being my first time using an HDRI for lighting, this was also my first time using multiple render layers artistically. The horizontal cuts in the sphere reveal a secondary surface beneath; the pixels where this surface is visible were rendered into a separate image file and composited back over the main footage. This allowed me to make a design decision late in the process to drastically darken what was previously a very bright and reflective chrome-like surface.

This is actually the second attempt at rendering this scene. The first attempt, which was 240 frames and took about 36 hours of rendering time, was a disaster. I had grown impatient waiting for my CPU to render, so I fired up a second instance of Blender and started also rendering frames on my crappy laptop GPU. To my surprise, this allowed me to render almost twice as fast. Unfortunately, I was not careful with my file management, and every frame rendered by the GPU was from a slightly earlier version of the project, making the resulting animation useless. I took my lumps, took the opportunity to make some tweaks, and rendered a shorter 60-frame animation.

Working with an old workstation laptop has kinda forced me into this workflow of creating very short animations and then manipulating them in After Effects to create variations and loops so I can show people something that is more than two or three seconds long. The original 60 frames were manipulated to produce 4 different versions, which were then animated together.

Thanks for watching! And if anyone knows of a better tag for stuff like this, I'm all ears.