A tutorial on Crystal Balls

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This tutorial was created by kohai, for the tibia.de graphics forum. You can find the original here: link


This is a tutorial on making crystal balls. Most of the hints here apply also for any kind of crystals. I made it for balls because I think it's the trickiest thing you can encounter.

Step #1
This is our ball. A blue, sphere-shaped ball. Nothing strange for you, it has its bright point on top-left of it, its lighting, and its shadow on bottom-right. Not very detailed (4 colors) but it is enough. I personally think you could do every material using just 8-10 colors and make it look perfect. That's a matter of applying colors... this was not what I was going to talk about here. Sorry

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Step #2
When light hits a crystal, it goes right through it. (For science students like me: I’m not going to talk about light's refraction and such phenomena so shut up lol). Light goes through the ball and when it goes out, it creates another bright point on the other side, but as it is a crystal we can see that side through the ball, so we see the new bright point also. (Not very well explained but I think you got it).

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Step #3
After all, our crystal ball is still a ball. So let's mix this two concepts: cristal + ball.

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Step #4

Well, the light enters by one of the sides of the ball and the other side isn't seen by us when we draw 2d solid objects... But it is still there and when it's a crystal thing, we actually SEE that side through the ball. So we draw the shadow on the other side of the bright point, but just there, because the light is going by the middle of the ball so this part of it is just normal colored.

Also, crystals are not normally of dark colors and just so you see it better I used a clearer color here.

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Step #5
You have to shade your outing highlight a little because the ball was still a ball (remember?)
It doesn't seem like a big thing but it makes a difference

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Applied gaussian blur and put some details with pencil..