Here's a couple examples of tiny 100 micron diameter spherical mirrors on chips, called solder balls.rjlittlefield wrote:The bluish ring does not look like any artifact that I am familiar with. Can you show us what that looks like in the source images?Deanimator wrote:Note the artifact around the bottom left hand corner of the top half.
The top half is polished smooth, while the bottom half has a brushed finish.
There is a balancing act here. If you put a mirror ball inside an integrating sphere that is uniformly bright except where the lens sticks through, then what you'll see is a uniformly illuminated circle with a dark spot in the middle of it. That's because at every angle the reflection shows either the integrating sphere or the black hole of the lens. But uniformly bright means that all the modeling goes away -- the mirror ball no longer looks like a ball.
So, to get a good rendering of the mirror ball, what you need is illumination that varies enough with angle to provide modeling, while not concentrating so much light in any one area that you get unpleasantly bright highlights from reflecting that.
--Rik
Best,