Remember the HAL 9000 computer from A Space Odyssey (2001)?
Well i'm gonna write a tutorial on how to make your own HAL's eye :P

Step 1: Create a sphere


Step 2: Move it up by pressing Page Up for about 3-4 times, and give the sphere a red glass texture from the Glasses tab in the materials section.
It'll look a bit like this in the preview screen:


Step 3: This is the tricky part..
Duplicate the sphere and drop it to the ground with this button:

Now create a Torus and rotate it 90 degrees till it's parallel to the floor. The easiest way to do this is to click on the little 'A' button next to it. Like This:

I also modified the size of it so it's bigger than the sphere.
Make the sphere within the torus negative for boolean rendering.

Create a new Sphere. You will see it's right in the other sphere (which we made negative remember?).
Once again, press the lilltle 'A' button next to it and set the size to about this:
and set rendering mode to positive.
Move it a tiny bit down untill it is about halfway down the torus, like so:


Now heres where the magic happens.
Select the flat sphere, the torus AND the negative sphere.
Click the 'G' button next to the selection, and voila! theyre grouped! and the best part is, you can't see the sphere anymore (only in rendering/preview mode) but it made a hole inside the torus and flattened sphere!

Step 4: Give your group a nice metal-like texture, i used Noisy silver from the Metals section.

Step 5: now, we still have this lousy glass ball just levitating above the group.
Make a radial light: .
Again, press the 'A' button, and give it the proportions of about 5x, 5y, 5z.
Then press the little 'E' next to the light.
Set the Intensity to 50 and the color to some yellow-ish color, like this:


Now while the light is still selected, press & hold SHIFT, then click on the glass sphere so theyre both selected.
press the EDIT button on top of the screen and press ALIGN ALL:

Press the 'G' button again to group them.

FINAL STEP 5:
select both groups (holding SHIFT again), and again, press the ALIGN ALL button shown above.

That's it!
Play around with light colors and textures if you want.
Here's the result:


And used in a picture:


I highly reccomend saving the object, for further use.


If you like the tutorial or have any questions about the tut or the forum, please sign up! :)