High-Tech Pokéball IV: Shiney Bits

So far, in our quest to make a complicated, futuristic sci-fi Pokéball, we've made this:

Not terrible, but very basic.  Other than the button which bulges out too much, it sticks pretty close to the official art.  But as you'll recall, I was inspired by this picture:

I want to do something that has a similar, futuristic look, complete with glowing bits, while maintaining closer proximity to the original art.  So, now is when we start to really mess with things.

I have, in the past, made pokéballs that I thought (and still think) looked really nice, and one place where they differ is there is a greater sense of thickness to them:

Part of the reason I've made things thinner this time around is I'm going to stack on more layers.  The current red and white shell isn't going to be a red and white shell; it's going to serve as an under-layer for the real shell (and a target for shrinkwrap modifiers).
The first layer I want to add is the glowing stuff that will be seen through the gaps in the real shell.  I want it to look like there's some complex glowing circuitry, and I also want to reuse this base pokéball for all the others I make.

My first attempt at a pokéball, quite a while back, was a new take on the Dusk Ball, where the shell was crystal, over some glowing stuff:

I aim to stick to the same ideal of concentric rings of glowing stuff, so lets build that, using the dusk ball's 'circles in each of the six direction' design.

First, ditch the red and white materials for an underlayer material, which in this case shall be pale gray.  Then, make sure your 3D cursor is centered on your ball assembly, and add a circle:

Now tab into edit mode and move that sucker along the Z axis to the top of the ball.  Extrude it twice.

Keep extruding, copying, and generally moving things around until the vertices and edges form an interesting, somewhat circuity grid.

Delete the faces (X, Only Faces).

Duplicate your mesh and, using rotated by 90 degress around an axis (R, Y, 90 for the Y), make it line up with each side of the top half of your ball.  Then delete everything not over a shell.

Now model interior circuitry between the circles as you like.

Add a Shrinkwrap modifier targeting the upper shell.  Apply the Shrinkwrap, tab into edit mode, set the pivot to the 3D cursor, extrude (E), and scale.

Fair warning:  It would be easier and better to do this with textures.  I'm using geometry because I'm stubborn and annoying that way.  I'll do a texture version later.

So that renders out pretty neato already:

Now, over the top of this, we build our final shell.  IF we don't have any fancy geomitry to make it look nice, we can simply duplicate our undershells and scale them out.  In my case, hitting (S)(1.025) worked well.

Let's try making Pokéball materials out of glass...

That's kind of neat.
Okay, I want to do a couple of things.  First off, you can see the gap between the outer shell and the inner shell.  I want that gone.  So, let's make a rim that lines the inside of the ball.  Duplicate the bottom line of vertices on the shell, scale out, shrinkwrap down, and away we go:

Ultimately, I intend to modify the shells quite a bit more, but let's get a nice beauty shot of how we've done so far.

Next.