A quick baseball

[John Bigboote]

Hey-

 

I needed a baseball for a 'Pass the Ball' movie, and had an idea of how to make a quick-cool ball, it turned-out really cool and I thought I'd run it past you guys for hoots-

 

1st- the ball part is obviously just a lathed sphere, with a little bump added. 2nd I made a 'stitch' and copied and-pasted it 100 times so I had 100 stitches in a straight line. 3rd I made the 'path' which winds around the ball tightly, kinda tricky but not too hard. Then in bones mode I made 1 bone for the ball and 1 bone (each) for the 100 stitches. Auto assign points helped big in assigning the points to the 100 bones.

 

Then came the constraints. In a new pose (ON/OFF) I gave each of the 100 stitch bones 2 constraints...(1) a 'path' constraint with ease graduating from 0% to 99% (2) A 'aim roll at' with the bone 1 as target (made sure it's base was at 0,0,0...)

 

The result is a nice Hash-baseball and it looked great in the animation, I even gave it a nice close-up.

 

Here's a picture.

[KenH]

Eh? Why are the bones on the stitches? Do they move?

[John Bigboote]

No sir. Ever modelled a baseball? Tis a mathematical quandry, least it is for THIS hasher. The bones serve to spread-out the stitches along the path (explaned further in original post) the reason there is 100 of them is because 100 divides nicely into 100, so each stitch is 1% further along the path than the previous, and so on. Now I'm sure on a real baseball there is more or less than 100...but who counts? The 2nd constraint, the 'aim roll at' serves to conform the stitch to the surface of the ball perfectly...as opposed to trying to 'hand place' them, which would be quite difficult and the results would never be perfect.

 

I'm sure there are other, better ways to do a baseball. Perhaps something using surface constraints or a material, like the hash basketball. This was just a quick solution I came-up with.

 

And once finished, I 'baked' the pose...removing all the bones and constraints and leaving only the affected geometry.

[KenH]

Ah, got ya.

[Dhar]

That's some awsome work John. Great job!

 

WOW

[NancyGormezano]

it occurs to me that one might be able to get the stitches lined up along the path using emilio's new sweeper plug-in - although the path itself looks tricky to setup.

 

regardless - amazing effort mr. bigboote! - something a lazy person such as I would run screaming from.