I had so much fun creating a super glossy orb for my last tutorial, that I had to make my very own crystal ball – which I kind of love. I followed almost exactly the same tutorial from PsAwesome, but I changed the environment picture and a couple of the colors for lighting and such. The environment picture that I used can be found here. I figured out that using a darker picture for the orb sacrifices most of the glossiness, but to make up for that, you get to use lots of fun lighting effects.
Just in case anybody was dying to know, I used a (pinkish) radial gradient for the light coming from the crystal ball and then I rendered clouds as an overlay on top of it.
– d.e.
The Design Project 
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