Refractive Spheres
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 (Bloom, 3000×2000, 432kB) |
 (IBL, 1280×1024, 117kB) |
This scene demonstrates refraction. The sphere on the left is purely reflective and the other two are refracting the checker board underneath. This was a particularly difficult effect because it is difficult to know when you’ve got refraction just right. To make sure, I created the spheres in 3D Studio Max using the same dimensions as a glass ball that I already own. I set up a real-life scene as a reference using a chess board and a small stand to keep the sphere in place.
The refractive spheres also have a Fresnel effect applied to them for more realism. The Fresnel is the slightly reflective element you can see on the lower half of each sphere. This image has also been 16x supersampled for higher quality.
The skybox is by Valve. <3
Update:
The image on the right was rendered with image based lighting from a cube map, which was of the nVidia Offices. You can just make out a nice caustic on the table under the right sphere. Hurrah!
