The physics of... soccer balls?

[Gui Cavalcanti]

Has anyone ever thought about that? The physics of soccer balls are amazing. The way hexagons and pentagons interact to form it's surface is nearly impossible to imitate on a computer, even though you're given a couple of easy things:

- All the sides of all the polygons are identical
- There are 12 pentagons
- There are 20 hexagons

Given that, you'd think it'd be easy to do the math on, but no! It took one of my teammates and I about 2 hours to wade through some math to eventually find some solution for the angle between hexagons we deemed correct. Any other random physics concepts you've found completely mind-boggling that have to do with every day objects?

(excuse the randomness ;) )

[Aaron Lussier]

On team 166 animation, there lead animator actually did all the math of the soccer ball rolling in between the two robots at the end.

[evulish]

We don't have an animation team. We're cool. Yeah.

[Don]

It took one of my teammates and I about 2 hours to wade through some math to eventually find some solution for the angle between hexagons we deemed correct.
Wow you guys are dedicated. I just found the numbers on the internet. I made little polygons, extruded them, put them together, and spherifyed(sp?) them. I ended up with, in my opinion, an almost photo realistic soccer ball, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

In making this I kind of broke a cardinal rule of animation. In our animation, the ball is a tiny detail. The quality of the model and the texture never really showed, so I made it for nothing. It would've been easier to use bump mapping, and I wouldn't have had to use XRefs to keep my computer from crashing.

[MBiddy]

I got yer photorealistic soccer ball right here. (http://www.suurland.com/tut_ball/tutorial_football.htm)

[Gui Cavalcanti]

I feel rather inadequate now :) It was still fun to figure out the math... this is the best I could do in Rhino (haven't ever taken any classes, just kind of tinker around).

[DanLevin247]

Why not just use a geosphere and a smooth modifier?

[Gui Cavalcanti]

All the 3D studio max terms... I'm using Rhino, man, I got bare bones here :)

[Dan 550]

Guy, you should have a copy of 3DS-Max, at least because a copy came with the 2001 kit...demand it!

[DanLevin247]

Yeah, Rhino is pathetic compaired to 3ds max. The computer simply takes care of all the math in spheres and all that junk so it's easy.