ULTIMATE CHALLENGE

[Andy A.]

Originally Posted by negfrequency

Whoa nice. So creating all of the hexagons separately and then assembling them. that would totally work, just it would be a pain and take forever to do like you said. Also, soccer balls have hexagons AND pentagons, and sizing them correctly and angling them would be quite a pain in the buttox. Nevertheless, i didnt think of it, so points.

in fact i think ill go do it right now since thats the best idea ive heard, even though i should be writing a thesis.....

So that solves the soccer ball problem, but what about the baseball, or even a golfball which have far more complicated patterns?

This method would actually be fairly quick. Once you have the two basic pieces, the remaining challenge is assembling it with the proper coincident mates, and it should more or less build it's self. All the pieces are identical, so I don't see any reason why you would have to make them separately. Just use the same pieces over and over and reorient them.

Greg's idea on how to build the two pieces is pretty clever.

As for a baseball, just how difficult do you want to make it? A baseball's cover is two pieces stitched together, but it forms a very good sphere not including the stitching. The two pieces of hide are, as far as I can tell, identical. You could model the stitches, but it would be more time consuming the difficult.

You've got me on the golf ball. Short of a whole lot of Boolean operations (subtracting the dimples from a sphere) and careful construction geometry, I can't think of an easy way to do it. With out a golf ball at hand, I can't be sure there isn't some obvious pattern to the dimples. I've always assumed there was no pattern to it, but I could be wrong.

Now a basket ball, with all the little bumps, that would be a chore. And a resource hog. Try running that through a fluid simulator with a full mesh!

-Andy A.