Refractive Balls

Wow, bizzare, yet fairly cool looking. What's it like on faces ?

jffe

This is really cool.....overlapping 3D balls!!! Why didn't I think of that??? My "Crystal Ballz" just officially lost their luster LOL....

Is this one in the pack of flters he posted the other day ? I haven't gotten around to checking them out yet. Hopefully this one's in there, I still wanna see a face ran through it.

jffe

Another really great and weird effect from an unreleased filter.

Very well done and curious.

Tinkered with it for about an hour, and I came to this conclusion:
Don't look at me....

Yeah, I know you took my filter only as an example, but I thought that <MAYBE> I could do something close to that.
Boy was I wrong!

I have been thinking about making those 3D balls looking for other filters that could show how this could be built but the same as Morgantao, I was wrong thinking I could find a way to make this 3D balls, and also would be surely difficult to get the source image to be proyected into the balls in such a very good and realistic way.

You have really much skills and lot of experience on Filter Forge and admire the things you can do

This must be very complex, so I think that the only way is to see the filter how has been done, because I doubt that if uberzev explains it we will be able to replicate the same result unless it not something complex as I think, but I doubt it.

OHH! Thanks really very much for uploading the pre-release filter to see HOW you have done this great beauty and curious effect.

I went to see how this is done and have seen that you are right, is MUCH simpler than I could have thought, I can´t believe that ALL this is just by using some circle shapes with shading to make the 3D balls and use refraction to get the image proyected into the ball in such a very good way and then mix both with soft light blend mode.

This is a proof that you can think much better and in a different way about FF and you can have great ideas that are not so complex and work really very well.

ONE EXAMPLE

This has been done with a transparent background image because you can´t have either white or black background for obvious reasons of the balls shading

doesn´t it look really beautiful and great?

One more with the kingfisher

HOW have I done this ?

Well very simple, JUST go to the Circular Arc component and use the Invert checkbox, that´s all.

Here is the inverted version of the flower first example I have put

And here is the same town photo source BUT with the inverted Circular Arc checkbox activated

Glad you like the examples uberzev

Sorry that I did it shown at low quality, I normally always try to save them at 80-70 but this one seems to be more complex and could not reach to the 500K limit of the forum with this size I have put, and I choosed not to reduce the size and lower the compression.

I will try to see what more things can be done with this great, clever and very well done filter

another example with a color wheel

This is without modifying nothing in the filter, just rising the "size pixels" setting to the maximum and using a very multicolor source image

Like much this filter and love really the effects it can make

The original filter was not giving all the realistic and true spherical shape and 3D feeling it could give so I have updated the filter to make it more realistic (at least from my point of view) and have added 4 controls for the shading instead of only one and also have added the option to separate the balls in a 2D plane.

Also now there is 26 presets as before was only 1

Refractive Balls more controls.ffxml