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

if you get stuck i can email you/post a scene file that shows what its suppost to look like through the steps

That would be great..

or if you could have a look at my scene as it is now, and maybe tell me what´s wrong? I thought it looked right for a long time, but I can´t get the next set of 6-siders to fit in...

I´m starting to get an idea that there´s something fundamentally wrong.

It´s really not good for my faith in my modelling skills that something as apparently simple as a soccer ball can cause so many problems, but I guess there´s a lesson to be learned in that too hehe.

Anyway, you´ve been great so far so maybe you could have look at my scene?

i helped you out a bit on the ball you were working on, you copied the other half but you also have to rotate it.
take a look at the scene file to see what i mean.
i also included the balls starting from start to finish that you should be achieving.

right click save as

http://www.3d-dan.com/crxpics/fodbold3.mb

once you get thoes last holes all filled, select all the polys and go poly>combine
then merge verticies and you are home free

Thank you very much. Finally got it.. had a few frustrated hours last night, went to bed, and when I woke up I got it right the first time around, for some absurd reason :D I love weekends.. normally I never have time to test the ideas I get during the night.

Got a ball finished, and textured it too.. this is the classic "black and white" football, but I´m going to experiment with the texture and see what I can make it do as soon as I´ve posted this.

There´s two pics, the first one is from distance:
http://img222.echo.cx/img222/3250/football19um.jpg

and the other a closeup:
http://img222.echo.cx/img222/4091/football25bl.jpg

Dan, you´re The Man ;) (ok sorry for that one, but couldn´t resist...)

hey. no problem
glad you got it, you definitely need to take a minute and just think about strategy when making something like a soccerball, but once you get it it makes much more sense.

now hopefully when someone else decides they wanna try it they can just pull up this thread and catch on like how you did.

im still looking for a good way to lay stripes around the ball easily with a nice texture, maybe someone can add to this thread and help with the texturing

I made this texture today, just didn´t get around to uploading it...

I think it is rather nice:

http://img273.echo.cx/img273/1388/football41db.jpg

The thing I did was to planar map each "patch" separately, though all the 6-sided patches were then placed "on top" of each other in the actual texture, and so were most of the 5-sided ones, apart from the top and bottom 5-sided patches, which were keps unique, for things like the Adidas logo.

Hope it might help a bit. I can´t go into much more detail than that since I´m not really a texturing pro, but I´ll be happy to help in any way I can if you run into some problems.

yeah, that looks really good, nice work.