The physics of... soccer balls?
 

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 ;) )

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.

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

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.

I got yer photorealistic soccer ball right here.

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).

Why not just use a geosphere and a smooth modifier?

Geosphere? huh?
 

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

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

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.