Spinning Soccer Ball?

[Derek Hader]

I was kinda hoping to be able to pull this off with out spending $400 on a plugin… (Zaxwerks)

[Martti Ekstrand]

Then you might be able to use this image I did long ago as a CC Sphere source. It’s by no means perfect but for a quick animation it does the job – otherwise feel free to use as a template (it might need some dirtying if you want it to look as a real ball, I used it in a graphic).

cheers

https://kashi.hamabe.org/images/football.jpg

[Reloaded]

Hi Martti Ekstrand.
The soccerball texture you created is an excellent job. How did you do that?
The best soccerall we can have with no plugins and no 3D software.
A really nice job.
Congratulations.

[Martti Ekstrand]

[Reloaded] “How did you do that?”

Umm … having a real football on my desk as reference I started in PhotoShop with a 5 point hexagon for the top/bottom ones in a square image, added the lines coming out of the corners, distorted it with Polar Coordinates (polar to rectangular), squeezed the result to 25%, duplicated that, flipped vertically, lined it up at the bottom edge of the top for bottom part and ‘offset’ the bottom part horizontally by 1/5 of image width. (The important thing to remember when making textures for spheres is that the image wrapped onto the sphere has to be in 2:1 proportion.) The mid section I built by hand, imported to AE where it looked awfully funny and then by going back and forth between AE and PS with eyeballing I tweaked scaling and cylindrical distortion until it in AE roughly matched how the real ball looked. Finally I ‘bent’ the edges of the new mid black 5-point hexagons as the edges toward the ‘poles’ looked concave in AE. Could have tweaked a bit more but it looked good enough for what I needed and the hour I had assigned to do the job had gone. There’s probably some easy mathematical way of calculating this image but I left school way too early for that kind of math 🙂

cheers

[Reloaded]

Really nice. Thanks.