Preparation:
This was my first time ever using any sort of 3d modeling software, so I had to watch
a ton of tutorial videos for blender online before I could even start. I had a football game on in the background so I
decided that I would mess around in blender and try to make a football shape, and ended up going from there.
Once I got a halfway decent start to my football, it essentially came down to googling what I wanted to try and do
in Blender, and trying out different things to see what worked best for me.
Here's what I started with, after stretching two sides of a sphere:
Process:
I roughly lined up my shape to a reference image, and then used proportional editing to stretch the ends of the ball to better match the overall shape.
For the seams I extruted each quadrent out, in order to leave a gap between them. Once I smoothed out the shading, and applied a subdivision surface it started to look how I liked.
Next I had to model the stitching across the top. To do this, I created a flat rectangle object, and bent it into the ball. Then I just duplicated the shape along the top, and applied a subdivision surface to smooth them out.
I then made holes in the ball for the laces to look weaved into. This was probably the hardest part of the modelling process for me to figure out. I ended up deleting the face of the surface the ends of the laces were attatched to, then extended the edges inward, and then scaled the openings at the bottom of the hole down small enough to not be noticable.
After that I simply added two more rectangular meshes across the top of the ball, running lengthwise, in order to finish the lacing.
To do the texturing, ended up using a UV map of the ball by creating a seam between quadrents and unwrapping it to an image. Then I imported the image into Photoshop, and pasted a football texture overtop of it. Since i'm not great at photoshop and making patterns, I got my football pattern online from an artist who posted it up; free to use.
To make it look better, I made a simple normal map for my texture, using a Photoshop plugin from Nvidia, to make it look a little more authentic. I also added teh white stripes around the ends by selecting the mesh faces I wanted to change, coloring the material white, and only applying my normal map texture instead of both.
This gave me the final, rendered, product.
