Soccer Ball
 

I am doing my best to try to make a soccer ball, but at the time I can not figure out how I can possibly make the shape of a soccer ball. I believe it is an icosahedron (math people feel free to correct me). How is this possible to be made in MAYA!!??

Its killing me, there are tons of Lightwave Tutorials and 3dsmax. And I know plugins for Maya 4 and Maya 2.5 exist, but I need one for maya 5! :(

Someone please help :bored:

of course it depends on how detailed you need it, but maybe just a sphere with the right texture?

im trying to model one, not texture a sphere

Well if you have your heart on actually modelling the ball "the hard way", I would model each "patch" of the ball and just assemble them together.. Make a patch, then make a sphere.. and then form the patch to the ball, copy and repeat.. that actually might get very ugly, unless you keep patient and make sure you're pretty precise.. But nothing else is coming in mind unless you use MEL Scripting.

I think this is in the art of Maya book from alias press... Use a displacement map to modify the geometry of a sphere. As polyhedron it's a little different as the surface has both
pentagons and hexagons.

Here is a tut from a different program that you should be able to translate to Maya:
http://www.lightrays.de/html/tutoria...ll_tut_eng.htm

Here are some another tuts... again for different programs. Didn't realize there was such a demand for 3D soccer balls...

http://www.suurland.com/tut_ball/tutorial_football.htm

http://www.luxology.com/modo/tutorials.aspx#

http://www.panebianco3d.com/e_tutori...occer-ball.htm

http://www.hash.com/users/alweb/Sotut.htm

And finally, there is a Maya 4 plug-in that might help for this...
http://www.highend3d.com/files/dl.3d...p&file_id=1806

Cant you just use a sphere, lay out the UV's and apply a bump map pushing in at the edges of each tile on the ball? Because if you look at a soccer ball, its round.. its not really flat at any point.

after seeing this post i decided to try it myself as well
if anyone wants me to do a short write up about how i did it i can do that.

click the link for a full sized pic to see it better

in the picture is the first object i started with and the middle one is with the piece sub divided and faces extruded, the third is a somewhat modelled soccerball after some normal smoothing.

http://www.superhonda.com/photopost/...erball-med.jpg

full sized pic
http://www.superhonda.com/photopost/...soccerball.jpg

the trick is that there are smoe parts with 5 sides an some sith 6 sides, that is all you got to know! Get the real ball and model it!

the tools in maya make it very difficult to model a soccerball easily.

Turbo Dan, Nice Job! Did you have to manually place the facets?

yes, it takes some patients

Very nice ball! And it would be excellent if you could write up a short of how you did it.

It seems it is very time-consuming, which is ok, but I have no idea on how to go about it really...

here is what you gotta do to get started

create a poly gon cylinder, and in the options box make it 5 sides and no
end caps.
then make another cylinder, 6 sides, and no end caps
go to face selection mode and delete all the faces but the top face so you
have a flat face to work with.

select each of the two seperately and center their pivot.

line up one of the six sided poly sides up against one of the 5 sided poly
faces by rotating the 5 sided shape around 18 degrees in y
then place it so that its bottom edge is on the top of the 6 sided poly.
then select the 5 sided poly and press insert to get the manipulator, then
with v on the keyboard held down click and drag the dot to one of the
verticies where the two meet. then press insert again to go back to normal.
then rotate the 5 sided poly 37.377 degrees down (or up, whatever floats
your boat)

and then copy that 5 sided poly and put it at each edge so that they all
rotate down the same amount.
then once you have all that done copy that big piece and duplicated it and
rotate it 180 degrees and that is the bottom of the ball, then use polys to
fill the empty holes left over.

then combine all the polygons polygons>combine and then merge all the
verticies and make sure there is only one verticy per corner.

***then convert this to subd
then right after you do that, convert it back to poly, then you will have a more round version but you will still be able to select the 5 and 6 sided shapes.

then select all the faces to make up each 5 or six sided shape and extrude it out a bit, make sure keep faces together is on, and since its on you can't select two patches that are beside each other, so remember your extrude settings and get the rest a second time around

then once that is all done, give it a poly smooth

-Dan

wow... thanks A LOT! That is excellent.. and very fast too :D

I will get started right away.. it will probably be hard, but at least I have an idea now.. so thanks again Turbo Dan, and I´ll post my results in this thread..

Cheers, MX