"Mirror Ball Look"

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

I have made a mirror ball will many many little mirror squares. I placed a spot light on it, but its not “bouncing” off the mirror like this:

mirror ball
mirror ball1000×1000 254 KB

I am assuming blender lighting does not work like real lighting. Wondering if anyone knows how I can do this look or cheat it?

1 Like
2

Can you share screenshots of what you have so far?

3

Those sparkles are caustics (light bouncing off a glossy surface onto a diffuse surface), which are still really hard for path tracers.

The default render settings are also tuned to make them even less likely, sacrificing physical accuracy for lower noise and reduced fireflies (caustics being a common source of fireflies)—compare the default Filter Glossy 1, Indirect Clamp 10, path guiding off

default
default1920×1080 545 KB

to Filter Glossy 0.01, Indirect Clamp off, path guiding on:
512
5121920×1080 816 KB

Note the extra noise & fireflies, though. Even at 8192 samples (1h 15min), whole parts of the image are still unusable. And path guiding is only available on CPU, so you really pay for each one of those samples.

8192
81921920×1080 513 KB

Off the top of my head, a cheaper hack for faking it might be using Geometry Nodes to instance a small, narrow-spread area light on each face:

area lights
area lights1920×1080 1010 KB

or adjusting the shader to be highly emissive when the incoming ray is very very close to the normal direction (basically the same thing as the area lights, but done in the shader instead):
face emission
face emission1920×1080 1.01 MB

Both of those you could of course tweak further to get the light out of the shadow areas: maybe a normal check, or a painted map.

3 Likes
4

I think that “fake it” is the right idea. Also, be sure that the ball is illuminated from several different spotlights of various colors which surround the top of the ball.

Basically, the “reflection” in the third image is plausible, and in this case that’s really what counts. (But it usually would be “multi-color.”) Find any cheap way to get: “good enough for peace work,” and be done.

5

Why do you assume this… ???
…also there are two render engines:

  • EEVEE
  • Cycles

For (so called) realtime renderer (sometimes online renderer) like EEVEE bouncing light is not cheap so they restric the bouncing by default… you might increase the value for you scene.

Why do you think Cycles is called PBR (physical based renderer/ also offline renderer) ??

Also there are two setups for viewport and final render… (and of course the material preview… with very basic lights…)