Four Star Dragon Ball

Watching Team Four Star's ongoing commentary videos on all their Dragon Ball Z Abridged episodes put me in a fan art mood. Thus this attempt at a super realistic Dragon Ball was born.

I'm definitely getting more comfortable with glass shaders since getting Cycles to work. The Dragon Ball itself took almost no time at all. I made one star, set the color and emission, copied it 3 more times, moved them inside the ball, and added a small volumetric sphere in there to get the glow effect to work a little better.

I originally tried to cheat on the leaves by just making some planes with alpha maps. and while I liked the shape variations it was giving me, the final result just didn't quite have the dimension I was going for. I ended up just making a few leaf models and scattering them around with a simple geometry node. You can see the three leaves I made under the scene in the zoomed out shots, and the subdivided/sculpted grid I used to distribute them ended up being quit a bit bigger than necessary.