What's worse than getting a piece a gum stuck on the bottom of your shoe? Getting a black gumball. Try as I may, I cannot render this gumball machine to show it's true colors. For some reason the light isn't getting through the glass sphere. So I am left with black gumballs. What? I thought maybe it was a positioning error, like the position of the light, the background, or the sphere.
But then after tweeking the position of things, I changed the dynamics around and saw some of the gumballs coming through the glass, which makes me think it's not a positioning issue.
So I hid the glass from the scene and rendered, and got the illumination I wanted. But why oh why won't this thing work!? I think I'm going to have to hang this one up for now.