Twelve materials, one light.

Type-2 hard anodise, 12 µm oxide. Reads cool under a low key; do not push saturation above 0.2 or it plastics out.

Sand-cast, wire-brushed. The lobe should stay warm all the way into the terminator — bronze never goes neutral.

Grain runs with the equator. High anisotropy stretches the lobe sideways — the sphere is the only body that shows this honestly.

Eleven years of coastal weather. Half-metal by mass: the patina is a dielectric crust over a conductor, so the lobe blooms wide.

Thirty coats, each polished back. The white pin of the highlight sits on the clearcoat, not the pigment — keep it neutral.

Unglazed, single-fired at 1240 °C. A soft terminator and no visible pin — if you see a pin you have glazed it by accident.

The hardest sphere to light: almost all the information lives in the rim. Raise elevation before you raise exposure.

Carbon-black loaded. There is no highlight, only a broad sheen that follows the key by about eight degrees of lag.

Pale yellow T1 grade. Light enters about 1.5 mm and comes back warmer — the terminator should glow, not smudge.

Sheen dominates: the brightest band sits at the silhouette, opposite the key. Wrapped on the ball, it reads as a halo.

Hand-blown, cobalt-oxide charged. Expect a second, inverted highlight from the far wall — that ghost is the whole tell.

Bead-blasted cast sheet. The ball glows from inside the shadow side — if the shadow goes black you have lost the material.