Just following along the tut. I've applied the solidifer doodah to the sphere and adjusted the thickness, it's working as intended.
But I'm looking through the sphere and realised I can see the light source as if I'm looking through some sort of magic orb peering into a different world of physics. How, or, why does that work? See the first screenshot.
I found a tickbox just by exploring under the light's properties called multiple importance. That gets rid of the magic light source, which you can see in the second screenshot, so that's alg. But now I can't even see the orange outline overlay of the lamp. What's going on here? At first I thought, "Oh, the orange outline overlay etc must be being warped by the round glass sphere, let me move the camera to find it". And then I realised how ridiculous that sounded...
Again, not a problem, I'm just wondering which witch left their mystical orb behind and how & why its magic works so I can start slinging spells from my fingers.
Cheers!
- Update, it's doing it to all of the light sources too. Not just the area light. What kind of sorcery is this?
HI Harris,
It's probably best to leave some magic and sorcery in the world of computer graphics...or even in real life...
This is rather complicated if you don't know how a ray trace renderer works, but (quote from the Cycles Encyclopedia):
"If you turn MIS (Multiple Importance Sampling) off on a lamp, they will only be visible to shadow rays, meaning a regular ray will only terminate on emissive surfaces but not when hitting a lamp. So lamps will not be visible in caustics and sharp glossy reflections in that case."
Reflections and refractions do all sorts of crazy things with the light and they will be affected by the environment and the camera angle a lot. It wont always be a straight forward look at it. The orb is refractive so you can see the light source reflected on it, it's how it should work.
And you might get frustrated if you try to get exactly the same result as in the video, but again, you'd have to be using the exact same things so it wont always look the same. So experiment all you can, be ok with your scene and be fascinated with the magic.
...and some things (like MIS and what Shadow Rays are exactly) are (maybe) nice to know, but that knowledge is not only unnecessary for 3D artists, but even pretty useless (for most people).
In almost 12 years of using Blender, I have not needed it even once....
I actually tried to impress a girl at a party once, in 2017, with my knowledge of what a Shadow Ray is...but it didn't have the desired effect: she was neither impressed nor amused.
