Minor Project: Orb Transition Test #1

Now that I have a few textures I can work with, I wanted to test how I could morph my objects from one to the other. At the minute I'm using a basic dark, shiny, distressed material for a sort of 'transition' between the different textures since I do not expect to be able to do every single one I am talking about. For now, I'm trying to accomplish at least one texture per group of phrases (for example when 'When I think of my family...' or 'When I see hospitals...'). In a way I like this ambiguous form, especially when I animate the displacement on it because to me it feels 'unhealthy' or threatening in some way before morphing into something more defined.

In this particular test, I forgot to add a jiggle deformer on it or some other deformer, so the rotate/translate animation does not look as nice as I would have liked but it is just a test. I tried out a few different methods, and I found that rendering out the black orb and the ice orb  (both including the background because otherwise the light ray didn't show) worked the best. I imported those two passes into After Effects, placing the black orb above the ice so I could adjust the opacity. It isn't exactly what I want, but it's a step. I wonder if there's a better way to render out passes that would take less time to render...as my original test was just to render out the orbs without the background but that did not seem to work.