Subtitles of the Movie

So the next thing I want to look at is refractions. And refractions are the bending of light as it travels through one material to another, such as from air into glass and back out again. Beams of light travel at different rates. So what I will do is I will take this ball here and I'm going to use the scale tool, holding the Control key, I will select the red X-axis handle and that will give me a non-proportional scaling of Y and Z and then I will also flatten that out a little bit, like a magnifying glass. Okay, and next I'm going to rotate that around like a little lens, pull it out of the antenna there, poor bee. And now I'm going to assign a new material to this one, under Assign New Material I'm going to choose Dielectric material and this is specific to Mental Ray. You need to be using the renderer to use this material. So here, the dielectric material is very simple shader and the main thing that we are going to care about is color and index of refraction. So color allows you to tint the lens a little bit. Let's see, I want to tint it a little bit blue. And the index of refraction you can go online and find lists of these. One point five is different types of glass, but you can find one point six for lead glass, one point three for water and so on. Air is considered to be one. So I'm now going to - I should say vacuum would be one. I'm going to go ahead and render this guy. And now we will see - this is acting like a lens and it's refracting those rays of light that are coming through from beyond. One thing that you may want to do with these, it can be distracting, the shadow that I'm getting off of here. Often I will just turn off shadow entirely for that object. So it's up to you, but often I think it looks better without it. So the way I'm going to do this is select the NURB sphere and in the Shape node, I can open up the render stats and simply turn off Shadowing. Cast Shadows, turn that off. You can also turn off Receive Shadows. And now when I render, I will get a really nice lens and I'm not going to get that distracting shadow coming off of it.