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Here is what we are going to make:

Click to view fullsize

In this tutorial we are going to model a soccer ball (aka footbal, BuckyBall). I have searched the web and I have seen many great ways to do it, but they all had one problem - it’s impossible to do them in blender.

I recently found a way to do this using the blender deafult shapes and the subsurf modifier. Most people use the smoothing abilities of subsurfing, however I’m going to use the geometrical ability of the subsurf to create the Soccer Ball.

Note: As someone pointed out, I discovered this is not an exact model, the number of hexagons is not 20 as it is in a real soccer ball. Nevertheless, it’s good for backgrounds and other places where accuracy isn’t to important.

Step 1 - Preparing the scene

Open blender in a top view (Numpad 7), and delete the deafult cube/plain if there is one. (Preview)
Add a new Icosphere (Add→Mesh→Icosphere). Set the Recursion level to 2 and the radius to 1.

Step 2 - Creating the shape

Go to the Editing pannel (F9) And add a subsurf modifier, Set the Level of the subsurf to 1 (All the soccer fans out there should already recognize this shape).
Switch to Object mode (Tab) and then Apply the subsurf (We can’t apply it in edit mode). Switch back to Edit mode.

Step 3 - Material 1

Go to the Editing pannel (F9) And press new in Links and Materials under the box where it says 0 Mat 0, this will create a new material for the object (it will be Material 1)
Select all the vertices off the Ball (Click A in the 3d window to deselct all, and another time to select all), and click Assign (just under the new button) to assign the material to the vertices.

Step 4 - Material 2

Switch the Select mode to Faces (Ctrl+Tab and choose faces). Now the view of our ball will change and become full of dots - One for each face.

Now we need to select all the pentagons in the object. A regular soccer ball is made out of Pentagons sorrounded by Hexagons. If you are having hard time finding the pentagons, look at the image below.

Remember that there are pentagons on both sides of the ball! The best way to make sure you don’t miss any, is to go to top view (Numpad 7) and make sure you see 5 pentagons like in the image above. Then go to bottom view (Ctrl+Numpad 7) and make sure you also see 5 pentagons.
Now, let’s assign the second material - create a new material and assign it exactly like before. This will be Material 2.

Step 5 - Black n’ White

Now we will set the materials we assigned black and white. Go to the Shading  (F5) and then to the Material Panel (Click on the red sphere if it’s not already selected).
In Link and Pipelines it says 2 Mat 2 - this means we are editing material 2 out of 2 total materials. Since the second material we assigned was for the pentagons, change the settings to be what you want for the pentagon (I edited the color to black and renamed the material to black)

Click on the left arrow in where it shows the number of the material (picture above) - Whis will take you to edit the first material. I changed the color to white and renamed it White.

Step 7 - The ball is round (or at least it should be )

First of all, let’s smooth the ball a bit: Go to Editing (F9). Under the assign button that we used, there is a button that says set smooth. Click it.
Add a Subsurf modifier, this time set the level to 2 or 3.
You might notice that the ball is a bit bumpy even with the subsurf modifier, This is because of the way we used to build the ball. You can increase the amount of subsurfing to make it even smoother, yet I recomend not to do this. Remember that in reality the ball is not a perfect sphere.

Step 6 (optional) - Bumpy!

Now, most of us now that a footbal has little cumps in it where the pentagons and hexagons connect. I’m going to make them:
Select only 1 pentagon - Not More! Extrude it (E), select Region in the dialog that will pop.
“How much to extrude?” First of all, it must be equal in all areas on the ball, so to make it the same we will type the amount of extrusion using the numpad.
Second, we want to extrude a really small number, otherwise the effect destroys the look of the ball. I recomend extruding somewhere between 0.001 to 0.01. Although it seems small, it’s enough. I extruded 0.01.

Repeat extruding the pentagons, one at a time untill you extrude them all. The best way not to confuse if you already extruded a pentagon is to look at the color around it. If the pentagon of the color got a bit rounded and bigger it means that you already extruded that one.

Your ball should look something like the ball in the picture above - the black dots got round and bigger. This is OK, it means that you did things correctly.
Now we will extrude all the hexagons, one at a time. You will see that the back circles turn back into pentagons - this is how you can see if you already extruded the hexagon or not.

Add some lights, cameras and That’s it - you are done

EDIT: made it to BlenderNation
A tip from brian who posted it there

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 7:45 am and is filed under Blender3d Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.