Well, well, well. After countless hours of tweaking and nitpicking, I've done as much as I could to it. I will not say that it's completed because there are always things that can be improved, but I am pleased. I'll briefly discuss some of the final touches I added before I show you the final result.
When looking at my reference photo, I noticed that there was a slightly blue tone on the sphere which I'm guessing was motivated by the sky. When I realized my HDR dome wasn't giving me the desired look I wanted, I created a new render layer called "Kick" (for kick light) and set up an area light with a blue hue. I then rendered it all out, then in Nuke, I Merge (plus) my kick layer onto my foreground composite. I think it gave me a much better result, but in case it needs to be changed, since I rendered it out as a separate layer, I could quickly use a color correct node to adjust it's intensity.
If you look closely at the after image, you'll notice I added a texture map to my sphere to make it look like more like styrofoam. Specifically I used an aiCellNoise as a bump map to recreate the octagonal veins that styrofoam has. Then I used a height map to create dings and other surface variations. I used a roughness map as well to break up the specular highlight a little more.
In addition, I also quickly modeled a seam on my ball that not only serves for aesthetic purposes (because the reference ball had a seam), but I've found that it really helps to ground the ball and give the illusion that it's rolling through the space.
I also adjusted my animation slightly, and I added a very subtle bounce to my ball as it rolls over the crack to give the illusion of it changing from one plane to another.
And finally, here is my finished project. It features a build up of all my layers, so you get to see it transform in front of your eyes.
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