During the World Cup 1998, I saw a lot of football
matches, but instead of looking at the game itself, I couldn't
stop looking at the ball. During the match my brain couldn't
stop thinking about modeling the ball in 3D, And I don't mean
modeling it as a sphere and then put a simple texture map on
it, I wanted to model it 100 percent. When I started, I knew
the ball was made up by five and six sided polygons, and how
it was put together. But it was a bit of a fight getting the
objects rotated in 3d to fit together as a ball. But I managed,
and becuase of the nice result I wrote a tutorial about the
making of a ball.
After finishing (as you can see it under "Additional images"),
I thought about making an enviroment for it, and of course it
had to contain grass. And I had to see the ball up close, so
I needed some grass with a great amount of details, and because
of the details I couldn't fake it, so I made all the grass with
faces, which turned out great. And because of this I wrote a
tutorial about making grass.
And again because of the amount of details the net is also made
with faces, it could have been done with opacity maps, but as
you can see in the left side of the image, the net comes rather
close, and its possiple to see that each thread in the net is
3d and not flat, as it would have been if I had used opacity
maps.
As you can see, the grass is green and some places it's toned
with yellow colors; I varied the colors because if I hadn't
done it the grass would be green all over. This tiny variation
is not made in 3d, it's made with a Hue/Saturation adjustment
map in Photoshop, and it gives a bit more life to the scene.
Equipment
used: Pentium Pro 200, 128 MB RAM.
Programs Used: 3D Studio Max 2.5, Photoshop 4.0
Completed 1999.
Viewport face count: 286706 faces
Render face count: 978896 faces
