Mirror, mirror

Chrome has no colour of its own. It is a picture of whatever surrounds it. In a light grey studio our blob looked like wet paper. Real product photographers put a dark floor under shiny things for exactly this reason.

We gave the chrome its own little world: a bright sky, a dark floor, one pink light off to the side. The line where they meet runs around the blob like a horizon, and that line is what makes it read as metal.

The dent

The surface is moved by noise on the graphics card, and your cursor adds a soft dent where it hovers. The normals are rebuilt from three nearby points every frame, so the reflections slide properly into the dent.