OC Entertainment

When last we left our hero, he was still just a blue orb. He could rotate a bit, but glass, he was not.

This is ok for an orb of mystical power. Of course, it’s also ok for a decent-looking water planet. For something that’s supposed to be glass, it needs to have few more things. Better reflections, for one. And it needs to be a little more see-through.

Let’s start with the transparency part, as that will dictate how we do a lot of our lighting later. This process is startlingly simple (as with a lot of things in After Effects).

First, begin by duplicating the Marble layer in the Orb comp. Press Cmd+D (Ctrl+D) or go to Edit > Duplicate. Name the new (top) layer “Marble Outside” and the old (lower) layer “Marble Inside”. You can do this by selecting the layer and pressing Return (Enter on main keyboard).

Now, to make this name change make more sense. Select the Marble Outside layer, and go to that layers’ CC Sphere settings (F3). Change the Render setting for the Marble Outside layer to Outside, and Marble Inside to….can you guess it? Yes. Inside. Very good. Gold star.

Amazing isn’t it? You’ve gone from a funky blue orb, to the same funky blue orb with a slight blue line around the right edge. (If you don’t, don’t worry. That is really not important at this point.)

But if you were to turn off the layers individually, you will notice that, instead of a single orb, you now have an inner and outer half of an orb, rotating together (because they both have the same rotation keyframes), and yet completely independent.

Alright, next step, change the transfer mode of the Marble Outside layer to Add. This should give you a noticeable difference now.

Alright, now we’re gonna begin to mess with the lighting settings. Select the Marble Inside layer, and pull up the CC Sphere effects settings (F3)

Twirl up the Rotation settings and twirl down Light and Shading, if they’re not already. And for this part, go ahead and turn off visibility of the Marble Outside layer.

Feel free to play around with the Light and Shading settings on your CC Sphere filter. When you’re done, though, set them to the following:

Make sure that the Light Direction is negative 61, and the Roughness is set to point 107. Also don’t forget the Reflection Map and Internal Shadows settings.

Next, turn the Marble Outside layer back on, and give it the following settings:

Again, do not forget the Reflection Map, but this time, leave Internal Shadows unchecked.

You should at this point have something very similar to this:

We’re almost there. This is starting to look a lot more like something Saruman and Sauron would be using to chat online. But there’s still that annoying little edge on the right side. If you don’t have that line, go ahead and do this next step anyway.

Select the Marble Inside layer, and then add a Gaussian Blur, either by using the search box or, Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Gaussian Blur…

You won’t notice an effect right away. Don’t worry. Most blurs in AE come in with no bluriness level set. Modify that in your effects settings panel. Change the blurriness level to 30. Leave the Blur Dimensions at Horizontal and Vertical.

This affords us a couple of things. First off, remember that seam we talked about in the first tutorial? Well, if during this tutorial you tried to see your animation in action, you would have seen it gliding across the rear of the sphere (no rhyme intended). And while, technically, it’s still present, it’s hardly noticable.

Additionally, if this were a true glass sphere, then the texture on opposite side of the glass should not be as clear (unless that’s some REALLY pure glass). This helps (a little) the illusion that you’re actually looking through a solid material, and not just empty space that happens to have a texture wrapped around it.

But the best part of this is that now you could put an element inside the sphere by simply inserting that element in between the two marble layers.

If you’d like to use this as a single object inside a bigger animation, select both the Marble Outside and Inside layers and Pre-Compose them (see previous tutorial). Now you can move around the sphere as a single layer, while it retains all of the animation and attributes it had previously.

You will find some interesting things if you try to move that layer around in 3D space, but that’s another tutorial. Thanks for participating!

Project files available:

Glass Orb
Palintir w/ bonus Eye of Sauron!!