Soccer Ball

Hi folks, here is my 1st render for the month of September. It’s a classic Soccer Ball.



Some people believe that a soccer ball is the easiest model to create in 3D. After all anyone can apply a texture onto a sphere. But to produce a realistic looking soccer ball, you need to understand how the ball was made or manufactured.

A soccer ball is in fact stitched together with many leather pieces. And between these leather pieces you will see gaps. Although it is possible to fake this with bump mapping it really doesn't yield good results. Traditional bump mapping just don’t cut it especially when the model is so close to the camera.

So I decided early on that I needed to model all the individual leather pieces and join them together. Luckily a soccer ball only has two different leather pieces. A 5 sided hexagon and a 6 sided hexagon. The trick is to arrange all the leather pieces so that the form a geo sphere and then add a few modifiers to produce the final model.

As for the pitch, I painted the texture with the aid of two programs, ZBrush and Photoshop. I used ZBrush’s paint tools to paint the base layer of my grass texture. Using my own reference images I proceeded to paint additional layers with Photoshop. I also made a bump map for the pitch to add the extra realism.

The scene setup was fairly simply and wasn’t really render intensive. So I hope you folks will like it and please feel free to leave your comments.

And oh before I go, I confess, I got lazy this time and used 3D max 7 instead of Maya.

So till my next post ya, its bye from Ganz.

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