This tutorial explained how to create a low-poly crystal ball with a transparent, luminant material. What I’ve learned and practiced:

– increasing the number of segments in a sphere + unchecking “render perfect” and the phong tag for a more primitive shape

– changing the sphere type into Icosahedron (segments shaped as triangles)

– applying polygon reduction

– applying displacer

I wasn’t sure how exactly displacer worked, so I used help within the software:

Displacement is similar to Bump, the difference being that here the object is actually (not just apparently) deformed. This difference is best seen at object edges.

The Displace Deformer shows the displacement object per object deformation in the editor view, and does not have to be rendered in order to make the effect visible.

The Displace Deformer functions as a deformation object and must therefore be made a child of the object to be deformed (or be in the same hierarchy, below a common parent object). Make sure the object to be deformed contains enough subdivisions.

Always disable the Perfect Sphere option when creating a sphere. Leaving this option enabled will prevent a displacement map from being calculated.

– adding noise as texture in shader to add some randomness

– adding GI in rendering settings + preset to Interior – Preview (High Diffuse depth)

– making glowing material with transparency —> refraction = 2 —>texture as fresnel + change gradient from black to grey

– adding luminance and make the texture a gradient, 2DV

In the tutorial, there was a HDRI rig used (which isn’t free) so instead of going for a studio like lighting, I wanted to get a bit more creative and add a few glowing objects, to make an interesting composition. I also added two light sources on the floor, to subtly light up the center object.

I made some additional cubes floating in the air. Firstly, I thought that using cloner + random effector will give the best results. Then I realized that I will be able to place them more precisely by just duplicating and moving around.

I have also edited the original material by changing the gradient colour, converting the type of gradient format to 2D – Box and adding turbulence, which makes the inside of the cube look a bit distorted and more natural.

I’m really happy with the outcome of those experiments and I’ve decided to always add my own tweaks to finished products from the tutorials.

Final result from the tutorial for comparison: