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Plasma ball
Lit with Horo's WestRoolDayB.hdr (quality 16), DOF (64 rpp) and soft shadows ticked in the premium render. The hdr provides the background, a couple of clynders and a slack hand full of tori the base and table. The plasma effect is just a mapped image of a plasma effect on to a sphere. Another sphere provides the "glass" and a third the core of the unit. Render time about quater of an hour. Where possible shadow casting and recieveing were turned off on the materials so speed up the render. I chose quality 16 and soft shadows because it was significantly faster to render that way than quality 1024 and no soft shadows. The DOF was used to "explain" the softness of the hdr as a background. Also, to speed up the render process, ray depth was reduced from the default 6 down to 3 - which is about the minimum it is possible to get away with most of the time.
Comments 6
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oroginal idea great !
. Nice, it looks very 3D to me (the maped image). The rest looks realistic like it would in a physics lab. However, in the physics lab its not as bright, it would look like this if all the lights were off. So, my suggestion is to lower brightness of the image and increase reflectivity of the sphere.
3.5 feet or exactly 106 cm above the floor is your table top. So, it's that yellowish light noticable on the walls that creates the blue shadow. The length of the shadow fits with the distance of the light - about 10 inches behind and 3.2 ft above the table top. The light bulb is reflected on the upper left corner of the picture at the far wall, the blue reflection is the skylight from the window. So, we understand light and shadow and all fits. Oh, and the light bulb is visible on top of your sphere as well.
Thanks. Yeah, well using an image for the plasma is a bit of a fiddle really. But I just wanted to try something out. The "reflection of the stand on the table that's a bit irritation at the first moment - I took it for a shadow (knowing that there is a light overhead)" you observed - I loaded in the source and indeed it seems that your first impressions were correct, the table top has no reflection component in the material at all, so it would seem that the apparent reflection is a shadow. This too, I confess, had me fooled - since I couldn't say just by looking at the render. The position was more or less dictated by the hdr background, it needed to be dark enough to show up the plasma and also, the reflections in the sphere needed to be offset otherwise they obscured the middle of the sphere. Anyhow, as far as hdr's go, it's a good one, but in truth the camera was a little high for the kind of table you might reasonably have in your room - from other angles it is apparent that the table top is above the level of the top of your computer tower case which is in turn on top of your desk, this probably makes the table top about 4 and a half feet off the ground, which is a bit high maybe?
The table is positioned just about where Aiko is in my ?Render Agony?. You made an outstanding job in blending the objects into the HDRI background and this alone is well worth a fiver. The subject matter is excellently done, before I had read that the plasma effect is "only" a flat picture, I very much wondered how you accomplished that - more so because I contemplated something of this kind a few days ago but didn't know how to go about it. Clever, clever. Transparent spheres are always helpful if you get the refraction index right (I should have known it from my ?Strange Ring?). This, too, is worth a fiver. The window, which is in the back, is nicely reflected on the stand. The backdrop fits this composition spot on. It is just the reflection of the stand on the table that's a bit irritation at the first moment - I took it for a shadow (knowing that there is a light overhead). I am absolutely impressed by this one!
It all comes together very nicely. I am not at all surprised to learn that the plasma is a real photo image mapped into the scene. The glass sphere does a good job of making making the plasma look 3d. Your plasma procedural from bryce might be capable of a similar effect, but the ibl lighting probably would prevent the volumetrics from shading properly. Anyhow, no reason not to give you a 5/5 rating!