Thanks, Ranger. Funny you should mention shiny things. I made this one last night.
This one is sort of involved...convoluted...strange way of getting there. (lots of my stuff is like that.)
It started off as Shazcan`s tesselation tutorial and mutated into this.
If you look closely, you can see some of Mark`s highlight/glassy tricks, some I learned from Stroker`s
Tech Slop
And some odds and ends. The inner light , for instance is a white blob, Gaussian Blurred, and masked out where the tesselations are on the *front* of the ball. The distortion on the sphere is a combination of Displace and Spherize. The more details , the merrier, I say.
On the inverted reflection thing, it`s just that. Start with an image with nice contrast, turn it upside down, clip it to the sphere,(mask it if you can`t clip it) set mode to soft light, overlay, whatever works best on the colors involved, displace/shperize it, and reduce the opacity.
Although I don`t know how much of this will help you, `cause I`ve never used LE, so I`m not sure how much of this is available to ya.
I must say, though, it`s been inspiring to watch your growth here, and your hunger for knowledge. Well done, man. Keep it up.
First attempt at gel text 
8} 
Linear Mode
