So, these "sexy balls" are mostly just a bunch of big black balls that Stephen Colbert decided would be nice to put on a flat surface and shoot light at.
Right.
The weird-looking one in the top middle is both reflective and refractive; the rest are all purely reflective. The same configuration is duplicated on the opposite end of the flat surface.
In the middle of the surface and a bit behind the camera are six refractive spheres which Bouyack and I originally used to demonstrate the caustics that our ray tracer could generate.
THERE ARE FIVE LIGHTS!!! Their positions are largely irrelevant and hard to describe, but they're all white.
Resolution = 2048x1536, AA = 4x, Ray recursion depth = 10