Soccer ball

Really? A soccer ball? After a year you've been working with Blender? Come on, you can do better than that...

*Sigh*. Yeah, I know it feels like I'm starting all over again, but... I am starting all over again. In a sense. Learning a new piece of software takes time. First, you watch people do stuff. You do that a lot. Then you imitate them in hope that your stuff will look like their stuff. It doesn't. So you go back to watching other people do different stuff. And time flies by... Then YouTube comes along and throws at you hundreds of other tutorials that you absolutely have to see and there you are at 10 pm on Friday evening watching someone retopologize female figure even though you are working on a BLOODY SOCCER BALL!

Now, to be fair, it didn't go like that this week. I was able to get the final render in about two days of work—which would be impossible to pull off if I used only Blender. I'm not saying I wouldn't be able to do that, eventually, but it certainly wouldn't take two days.

The procedural approach seems to give better results when dealing with things like dirt. And while it is possible to use noise generators in Blender, the masking process is a bit convoluted. One of the strengths of SP I'm beginning to discover is its ability to quickly generate masks from the object's topology (aka dirt in creases). Speaking of dirt, however, I'm glad I took some time to look at reference images of dirty soccer balls. My intuition would tell me that dirt accumulates mainly between the panels, but it doesn't always seem to be the case. Maybe it depends on the material and construction process? I don't play football, so I can't really tell, but if you are someone who does and you feel like explaining that to me, feel free to do that in the comments below.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, soccer ball manufacturing. I did read a bit on what a soccer ball is made of, just to be able to show off that this particular design is called "Buckminster Ball" and has 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. In geometry, it is called (spherical) truncated icosahedron and it used to be available as a primitive in Blender if you enabled the "regular solids" add-on. I couldn't find it in the list anymore but I wouldn't have used it anyway since I wanted to follow along with Mesh Modelling Bootcamp (yes, one of the meshes created is a soccer ball).

Funnily enough, there is not much to tell about the texturing process. I used one texture set and specified the white and black panels by UV island selection (I had UV unwrapped it so that each panel was separate). I then added a couple of grunge maps and dirt generators based on the curvature map and I was ready to render. Which is where I spent most of the time, really.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon an HDR that could be used as a semi-believable background. But positioning it was an issue. Until a couple of hours ago my "final" render made the ball look gigantic because the environment was not scaled correctly. Well, it still isn't, but I hope I've made it slightly more realistic. The reason I didn't scale the HDR in the first place is that with higher scale ratio the texture starts to stretch and much of the detail is lost (you can see that near the bottom of the image). But if I don't scale it, the tiles look way too tiny (a soccer ball usually has a diameter of 22 cm). But you know what? Why don't you judge that for yourself:

Original HDR scale

Potentially improved scale

And that's all for today. I'll keep an eye on CG Weekly Challenge to see what their next topic is, and if I don't feel inspired to contribute there, I'll most likely continue with the bootcamp modelling and finish my tutorial material in Designer. See you next week!