Building a High-Tech Pokeball VI -- Shell Rhymes With Hell

In Part 5, we left off with this sorry state of affairs:

Now, our quest to build a shnazzy, high-tech pokeball continues!

Delete the upper and lower shells.  We aren't using them.

We'll start with the lower shell, as it's simplest.  We want to construct a very plain bottom, but with a couple of seams so it looks like it was made of more than one piece, and a visible gap to reveal our glowing bits.  Naturally, we shall abuse the shrinkwrap modifier to achieve our goals.
We'll start by adding a sphere, scaled out to surround our ball, and delete the top half.

Chop out the bottom vertex.  It's more trouble than its worth.  Then duplicate a pair of the bottom rings, and rotate them around to the front of the ball and chop off the top.

Our goal is to integrate these two things to serve as the base for our shell.
First, delete any vertices on the shell that would be covered by the half-ring.

I'm going to remove every other internal edge in the ring itself by selecting them, and hitting [X]->Delete Edge Loops.

I'm going to add a loopcut down the middle of the arch to preserve the form (Ctrl-R)...

Then start merging and connecting. (Alt-M).

By connecting the vertices in the middle of the non-hypotenous edges of the triangle (the two short edges)(Select the vertices, press F), then subdividing the resulting connection(W, Subdivide)...

We give ourselves the geometry we need for four quads.

This, with the kind assistance of the Shrinkwrap modifier, will form our outer shell basis.
Oh, and cap the bottom however you like.

Okay... Shrinkwrap this sucker to the undershell (the first shell we modeled).  Set a decent offset, add your solidify, bevel, and subsurf modifiers, and tweak until it looks nice.  This is going to be our basis for a lot of stuff.

In fact, I duplicated the shell, then moved the duplicate to another layer (M), in case I ever wanted it back.

Okay.  Now let's make it look like this was assembled in a factory by seperating out parts, remembering to create a couple gaps for light to shine through.

At this point, I added a mirror modifier, pushing it up to the top of the modifier stack, so I would only have to work with one side at a time.  For those who wonder why I haven't done this before, it's because A) I have difficulty keeping spheres spherical when working in mirror mode, and B) some of my details are asymmetric (Look at the circuitry above!  That's no X-mirror.)

I think instead of a gap, I'm going to have a glass panel.  This was created in the same fashion as the other detail:  grabbing edges and ripping them with V.

I also added some 'Darker' textured segments, to serve as a grip.  The reality is I will change these textures later, to make them appear like a physically more grippy segment, but for now, darker is a good stand in.

That looks pretty good.  I wonder how it would look if we duplicated it for the top one, and just changed the colors around.

Hm.  Doesn't quite have the bold beauty of th ones that inspired me, but it's getting there.  Maybe if I uncut the top...

And that helps.  The remaining thing is to get that grip texture just right.

The texturing so far has been fairly simple for Cycles:  Mix shader, top one is diffuse, bottom is Gloss (or Anistropic).  If I want something to look more plasticy, I push the gloss shader towards white; if I want it to look more metally, I push the gloss more towards the diffuse color.  Glass things are a glass shader, glowing things an emit shader.

But for the grippy bits, we want an identical clone of the non-grippy shader, but with some grit.

I'm going to duplicate the original shader by loading it into the grip-shader slot, then hitting the plus button:

Then edit it in the node editor.  Then I'll add a Voroni texture (Shift-A, Texture, Voroni), crank the scale up to something big, like 60, and plug it into the displacement segment of the output node.

That image tells us two things.  1, the scale needs to be even higher (the higher the scale, the smaller the cells), and 2, we need to make the effect less pronounced.

I found cranking the scale to 200 worked about right.  To lessen the effect, add a Color Ramp node (Shift-A, Converter, Color Ramp), and set one of the two colors to mid gray, and the other to just a bit lighter than mid gray, and then move them in.

Lookin' Good.