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CASE STUDY: the glass sphere effect


:(| That distortion of the text is really getting me. It doesn't work right just spherizing it. [confused] I messed around for hours, trying to spherize/polar coordinates/liquify to get the distortion to look like the real thing, but had no success.
Plz give me more hints, or an example of one you made or someone else???!!!!!!!!!!!!........please! :(|
 
hahaa :rofl: aaa don't sweat it too much Patrick.

I'll give you a one-word hint: Displace ;)

I believe now that "the word" has been uttered, Stroker (Lightyear of Borg) should be making his entrance very soon. Let's all get cozy and wait for his omnipotant arrival shall we? %}
 
Oh, Ok, thanks. I think I was just on the comp too long. You know when your tying hard to do something, and your getting frustrated cause it's not working but you can't stop, then before you know it it's been hours and hours. [confused]
Yeah, I think I'll take it easy and keep waiting for more info and hints. [innocent]
Does any one have an example of a glass sphere someone did? \:]
 
Uh, woh.... [stuned] .....thats all cool stroker, but I don't get a lot of it, like how do you make that rainbow box thingy, and exactly the steps with the clipping groups and stuff. [confused] I'm kinda confused. [oops]
 
That's the rub of Technical Slop. Diving into the middle of it might not get you too far if you are not already familiar with my work or the tools involved.

- Get familiar with Curves.
- Get to know your way around Gradients.
- Get to know how to work in seperate channels.
- Get to know clipping groups or whatever they are called now-a-days.
- Start at the beginning and slowly work your way up.
- Knowing line factoring is good, but not necessary.

For example, the rainbow box thingie is explained in a way earlier tutorial. It involves gradients in seperate channels.

Start right here:
http://tech-slop.serveit.org/tob.shtml

Like I said, take it slow.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
 
Let loose here all thoughts, ideas, concepts, questions or anything else concerning that thread's topic.
Click to expand...

I got one that used to drive me crazy. You don't have to distort rastor background that's underneath. For some of those, best to bring in something else to distort. If you take rastor that small and try to magnify it that much, you won't get very far.
 
Explain your thought some more Stroker. I'm a lil' hazy on your specific point on that one. \:]
 
If you try to magnify small type in rastor the way the glass ball does in real life, you'll get a mess.

Simple example using Spherize attached.

I'm saying -
Rather than use the rastor in the photo, drop something else in with better resolution.

Make sense?
Or did I give away one of the tips you were saving for later?

edit:
I can't see the attachment. Tells me it's there, but I can't see it.
Hiccup?
 
Ok, well I managed to make the glass part itself, but I'm reading over stroker's tech slop to figure out how to do the distortion underneath. Right now it looks like a creamy ball not glass, but I did the reflection around the ball and the shadow underneath, so tell me what you think/ improvments!?.... :\
Do you think the inner shadow is too heavy? \:]
 
Yeah i get ya now Stroker. Cool. 8))

My suggestion would be to simply type out some text (or the same text) on a type layer at a huge size, then rasterize it and spherize/displace it.
Either that, or try to scale up a copy of the text part of the image for that purpose.

Patrick...
Nice attempt.
May i suggest you either lighten or remove the milky whiteness within the sphere. Otherwise, there's no need to distort the type through the sphere. ;)
 
Keeper, I can remove the whiteness easily. It's just there because I made the sphere on a white bg, then merged and I moved it over to the text. On a white bg it looks clear though. :\
 
patrick, that glass ball is amazing! :shocked:

Here's a quick attempt at the refraction.

First, I started with a medium grey background 200x 200.
Then I made a red to green sphere using the elliptical marquee and a circular gradient. Red on top. Green on the bottom.
 
I next created another red to green sphere on another layer. This time right to left. Then the layer blend mode was set to hue. All the sphere layers were slightly guassian blurred to get rid of any sharp, pixellated jaggedness.
 
This was saved as displace.psd to be used as my displacement map.
Here is the result, setting horizontal and vertical displacement at 200% within a circular selection. I also painted in shading, the reflection hot spot, shadow, and glass edging.
 
I felt I was close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board. I created a new displacment map using Stroker's zoom cube tutorial as a base.

I remember that the frequencies of light bend at different angles through a len or prism, causing the rainbow effect, so that effect had to be duplicated also.

The refraction color effects were created by displacing the red and green channels different percentages with the displacement map after the initial displacement of the text layer.
 
Oh.....yeah, nice Moth. [innocent]
I'm going to try that right now. :D
 
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