How to get a nice glass sphere render?

[TeoRossi93]

Hi guys!
I'm working on an odd task, rendering a golf ball inside a glass sphere. It's an image that is going to be used in a UI design.
I'm attaching an image (1) that is an AI generated reference done by the client.
At the beginning I wasn't getting nice results since a "solid" sphere would distort the contained objects. I tried then the thin film option in the material and I even tried to give thickness to the sphere, but the output is really bad (you can see the attached images 2).
SOmething I'm aiming to is the attached image 3 I guess.

I think the big issue here is represented by the lighting that must be studio and pretty clear and neat since the render is going to be featured in a UI system

[romullus]

The third image is not solid glass sphere, it's soap bubble. If you want that look, then enable thin walled option and add some colourful gradient to reflection to emulate thin film effect. On the other hand if you want glass sphere, but don't like how it magnifies a golf ball inside it, you can scale it down until it looks right in the render. It's a cheat, but nobody will now if you don't tell them ;]

[TomG]

To avoid distortion due to refraction, set IOR to 1, and then to get reflections still, use a Clear Coat with any IOR you like.

[maru]

You could also try using a solid glass material, but modelling the sphere with some very low thickness.

[burnin]

For such artistic cases use 'the old faithful' - Legacy Material. It has exactly what you need.
In example ~ just reflection w/ thin film

[TeoRossi93]

Hey guys! Sorry for the later reply. The big issue for this image is that it's going to be used in a UI with overlapping graphics, I wasn't allowed to be too much fancy with reflections and stuff. I'm attaching the final output for the client.

The only thing that I wasn't really able to achieve was the "thickness" effect on the edges of the glass ball (like the 2 images attached with bubble/droplets).

[BigAl3D]

This is a very tricky look to achieve. The A.i. did a good job of getting the feel of it. Unless you are animating or doing something else that REQUIRES you to get this look by just hitting render, then I'd think of it in pieces that you assemble in Photoshop or whatever. Here, I rendered out the glass ball with two lights and used architectural glass and I added a Fresnel effects to get the center to render mostly transparent with alpha.

I grabbed a simple gold ball of C4D's assets (uses a crazy looking normal map to get the dimples, but I'm guessing a proper mesh would give better results. I thine rendered the not-so-great ball and played with the layers in Photoshop. In the ballpark, but needs work. If it was me, I'd make the glass manually, and then render a ball with a warm and green light to try and get the look.

Maybe this will spur an idea.

[maru]

I still don't get it why not model a sphere with thickness by modeling a sphere with thickness. :)

[TeoRossi93]

I still don't get it why not model a sphere with thickness by modeling a sphere with thickness. :)

The problem with thickness is that the "thick" part was too harsh in my tests