How to make this type of iridescent glass?

Question

I have seen this iridescent soap bubble glass and wanted to recreate it. Does anyone know how to recreate it with shaders?

I have made like You said, but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

Here is a try to get something close to the reference image. But it's a guessing game since we don't know how it was created and little changes can completely change the appearance.

Let's use what moonboots and Marty Fouts wrote in the comments and go with a glass marble, a glass spiral, an iridescence shader, plus some glare from the compositor. The render engine is Cycles.

The Marble

Add an Icoshpere to the scene and give it a Subsurface Division modifier to make it more round. Set shading mode to Shaded Smooth. Add a Solidify modifier.

Activate add-on Add Curve: Extra Objects that comes with Blender. Then add an Archimedean Spiral. In the options panel that pops up, set Spiral Type to Spheric and Turns to 4. In the curve properties, use the Bevel options to give it thickness. You also can use another curve object (Circle), edit it a little, and use this as a Bevel Object. It will distort the light that passes the spiral.

If you like to have things procedural you can "model" this with Geometry Nodes.

Camera and Light

Place the camera in front of the marble and a Spot light behind it. For the Spot light you can use an IES profile if you like.

To control the reflections you can add a plane over the marble or at one side.

In the World Properties set up an HDRI. It has a huge impact on the appearance of the rendered image. Try different (night) HDRIs. You can turn down the Strength of the emission in the Shader Editor for the World properties.

Iridescence Glass Shader

Search here on BSE for Iridescence and you will find this question Iridescence In Cycles?

We will use the node group from the top answer. Just add a Hue Saturation Value node to control the color spectrum better. (The Hue shifts the color palette of the Color Ramp node.)

To control the iridescence (more on the outside of the sphere, less in the center) we add a Layer Weight node and a Color Ramp node.

The Principled BSDF with Transmission set to 1 and very low Roughness is our glass shader.

Compositor

Here you can add one or two Glare nodes, and a Defocus node if you want.

Marble Examples

1. uses Sahara Night HDRI
2. same as 1 but lowered the thickness of the Solidify modifier of the marble
3. like 1 but Blue Lagoone HDRI, tinted with a very light blue for (Color 1 of the iridescence node group)
4. similar as 3, but bright plane on top and changed the color ramp values for the iridescence shader
5. this is Marble 2, no Solifify modifier on the marble but one on the spiral. Tinted spiral
6. same as 1 but increased the thickness of the Solidify modifier & black plane on top

Blend File

Materials and node setups for the objects and the world backgrounds are included, but no HDRIs. You can get them from polyhaven.com.