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!

High Tech Pokeball V: Inner Piece

We left off with this in Part 4 of building a high-tech Pokeball.

As I rearranged things so I could see the inside, I noticed something:  That inside looks too simple to be true.  There needs to be some more detail added for our inside to keep up.
I'm going to hide the top half.  I'll fix up the bottom half, then replace the top innards with a new copy of the bottom innards.

The primary difficulties are the mirrors and the lights.  The rest looks too clean -- but that's a feature the entire Pokeball shares at this point, and one we will not rectify until much, much later.

The mirrors are boring because there is nothing interesting to reflect.  The lights look wrong because they are straightforward emission materials -- The camera looks at the light, and the light, instead of taking its surroundings into account, says "This color, this bright."  But, of course, nothing works that way in real life.  Not even lights.

The solution for the lights is easy.  W are going to duplicate each of the light structures, scale it up (S for the green thingy, Ctrl-A for the points), and assign a simple, colorless glass material to the upscaled versions.
(In the case of the point lights, I also had to apply the skin modifier to make them behave).

Already that looks more interesting.  And physical.
In the end, I took the following steps:
1) Separate the mirrors into their own object, and make the bevel and the solidify thinner.
2) Duplicate the mirrors, scale them out (using the cursor as the pivot), scale them up (using individual objects as pivots), and color these new backing mirrors black to give a faint outline.
3) Duplicate a curve from the top segments, extrude it, turn this into a lamp with a glass cover, to give the mirrors something interesting to reflect.
4) Crank up the mirroriness.

Much better!  Okay.  Let's call this good for now, and start working on our proper shell.

High Tech Pokeball tutorials

This tutorial is aimed at those who already have the basics of Blender down.  In it, we model a high-tech Pokeball.

In Part 1, we model the interior.

In Part 2, we create the hinge and button assembly:

In Part 3, we create the basis of the shell.

In Part 4, we make the shell complicated, with glowing circuitry and the like.

In Part 5, we upgrade the level of detail on the inside.

And in Part 6, we create the final shell, including a procedural grippy material.

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.

Build a High Tech PokeBall III: Make a Shell with the Skin Modifier

In Part II, we made this sucker:

Let's add the shiny shell on the top to complete our basic, high-tech fancy pokéball.

High-Tech Pokéball Part II: Latch and Hinge

Time to continue building a 3D pokéball.
We left off with this in Part 1:

Neat.  But we can take it up a few levels, eh?

Build a high-tech Pokéball in Blender -- Part 1: Interior.

This is part one of how to build a high-tech Pokéball in Blender.  Part 2 is here.
So, a short while back, I made this picture:

And I decided I wanted to take everything I had learned making various Pokéballs, and make an even better ball.  Complete with hinge and interior.  As I did some research on Pokéball interiors, I ran across this picture:

By this guy on deviantArt.

Now I want to make balls of similar awesomeness, complete with glowy stuff, yet with a much closer resemblance to the original art.  So, here we go: