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Modeling a soccer ball
Published by brian on July 24th, 2008 in Tutorials
This is a pretty good step by step tutorial on modeling a soccer ball in Blender. There is one possible change I'd make to the tutorial.
Note: This tutorial is great for a simple prop in the background. But it doesn't stand up in accuracy. Upon reviewing the tutorial further and receiving comments this is indeed not a completely accurate representation of a soccer/football. For a video demonstrating how to create an accurate version see here.
Find the tutorial here.
The change I'd make to the tutorial is to not extrude each pentagon individually. But rather when you select the pentagons to set the material this is when you should extrude the polygons. Just make sure to extrude by region and in place. And then with all the polygons still selected use Alt-S to translate/scale the polygons along their normals. And remember if you happen to deselect the pentagons you can reselect them by selecting the material assigned to them in the Links and Materials Panel. You do have to extrude each of the hexagon's individually to get the right effect.
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19 Responses to “Modeling a soccer ball”
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a quick way to select the pentagons:
select ONE face in face-mode and hit shift-G>select similar faces>area, tadaa!
good tutorial
a quick way to select the pentagons:
select ONE face of a pentagon in face-mode and hit shift-G>select similar faces>area, tadaa!
good tutorial
select ONE face of a pentagon, of course
"You do have to extrude each of the hexagon's individually to get the right effect".
It's not necessary.
You can select non adjacent hexagons and extrude them at one time.
This way you have to make 4 extrusions for the white hexagons.
MarcoA
@Bulb : just learned something new…
Wonder never cease with Blender eh? :)
I think that you do need to extrude each individually. If you don't then you can't extrude along the normal of each pentagon, only the average normal. In that case the best you can do is scale them up, but that makes the faces slightly too large. Any other solution still requires you to selec each pentagon.
Of course I could be very wrong.
arg i am an idiot
@Bulb: Thanks for that! I did not know about that. Everyday I still learn something new.
Thanks a lot brian for posting my tutorial!
Finally made it to BlenderNation :D
I added your tip at the end of the tutorial =)
Great tutorial! This one is definitely really good. Thanks for the Shift + G bulb. Didn't know that one before…
Cuby
anyone knows how to model a teamgeist ????
Ferman: You can use a sphere and use the retopo tool. What do you think about???
real football doesn't look like that. each line should connect 2 pentagons together.
A football is a truncated icosahedron, one of the archimedian solids. It is also known in geometry as a BuckyBall or Football. It consists of 12 pentagons forming a dodecahedron which have then been extruded out with the gaps between filled with hexagons. So each pentagon is surrounded by 5 hexagons. So the tutorial model is correct.
Why the site cannot be opened?
@RedBirdiii: It seems to load fine here.
@RedBirdiii: The site loads fine for me.
Archimedes is correct about Football shape. There is a picture that describes it well on Wikipedia. This is a great tutorial for starters and I also recommend the video.
Now it loads just fine..
Sam, weren't you and I just talking about how this is exactly the reason we need N-Gons?