So we've created our pin and
we're moving on to the bowling ball! So welcome
to Choosing the Right Sphere!
So in this video we're going to learn that the
sphere is just the defining shape. The mesh topology
of that sphere can vary greatly,
and, just for example here, we can have a UV sphere,
an ico sphere, and even a cube.
And we'll be taking a brief look at the subdivision modifier.
So let's hop over into Blender now and
experience some of these first hand.
OK, so welcome back into Blender!
I have loaded up a default file. If you've still got a previous project
open do remember to save it, before closing it and moving on to this.
Let's start, not with the cube, we'll go on to that in a
moment, and we will add a Mesh
object in Object Mode, that is a UV Sphere. Let's
take a look at that! And before we do anything else, let's boil it
down to its fundamentals. How is it made up? So let's have a look over
here in the Operator Panel, so we can see
it has 32 segments. Let's play with that, let's move it up and down!
Excellent! So we can see that's changing the vertical ones, that's a bit like a
segment of an orange, so that's a good way of remembering that. And the rings...
Ah, there we go, the rings define how many are going around
the surface around here in a circle. So
we've got our rings there and our segments coming vertically, and the rings are horizontal lines
going around. Latitude and longitude I suppose, much like the
Earth. So if we boil this down to its very basics, so it can only have
a minimum of 3 segments and 3 rings, we can see
that's what it looks like at its simplest form,
so some sort of diamond or something along those lines.
And as we increase the segments, it can get very very
smooth and detailed, but you end up with
a stonking great bit of geometry there. That's
64 thousand faces, 130 thousand
triangles, so that's a pretty high def sphere. Usually you
would not be modeling anywhere near that, so we'll just set that
back to where it was before at 32 and 16, and we
can adjust the radius here to whatever size we want,
as always. I'm going to leave that at 1. So I'm going to leave that on
our view, I'm going to open up the Outliner here,
and I'm just going to hide that sphere from
view, so we can open it up again in a moment. So that's that object created!
Let's now play with another type of sphere,
an Ico Sphere. So an Ico Sphere, lets
go down to the basics. So we've got Subdivision here
in the Operator Panel, let's turn that right down as low as it will go. OK, so
let's inspect it, let's move around, and we can see quite clearly
that this is a spherical like object
that is made up of triangles, and the more
triangles there are, the more detailed and more spherical
it becomes. But it's always triangles, so the entire surface
is completely even and divided with these triangles.
However, that can cause problems
with your geometry later on, because there's not defining edge
loops on that, whereas with the UV Sphere there is. So
let's close off Icosphere. So we've experienced those two. I'm
just going to up that back to about 3 or 4.
Yeah, that's quite high def there, we'll leave that there. So let's hide that one.
And then, I mentioned a Cube!
And most of you were probably thinking, what's this guy on? Is he off
his rocker? That is not spherical! Not yet,
so much like an Ico Sphere is made
up of a series of triangles, if we
subdivide this cube, then
you actually end up with something that's rather spherical.
And this is a modifier that we'll use quite a bit, later on,
but I just want to hint on it now, because it's a very powerful modifier
that does come with some constraints. So if we hit the Modifier
tab up here, in the Properties
Pane, and Add a Modifier of type,
here we go, Subdivision
Surface. So it's in our... Oh, gone of there! ...in the Generate,
but if we scroll down,
you can already see with it set here in the, no
Operator Panel this time, over here in the Modifier Panel there
is a number of Subdivisions, so 0 is no Subdivisions.
But if we Subdivide once, we get a kind of
spherical shape. If we bring up our Icosphere,
we can see it's still slightly bigger than what it was
before, but however, when you Subdivide a second time,
and we hide our Icosphere again, we can see it's gotten smaller. And
if we subdivide again, it gets closer and closer to a
sphere. Now, it's a little bit wonky still, but we're
almost there! And there is an operator called to sphere, I'm not going to show
you that, at the moment. I just want to show you that the cube can
actually be a sphere, using the Subdivions Surface,
and I'll just cick Apply to apply the modifier
to our cube.
Now, there is one thing to take into account whenever
you subdivide an object like this, and if I hop into
the Wireframe mode, you'll see it really clearly. So we're in Wireframe
mode. If we enable another one of these
objects, you can see that those two pretty much line
up with one another, but this sphere in the middle is nowhere
near. In fact, I think it's about 16%
too small. So if we go into View and set it to
Orthographic, so we can make a judgement on size a proper one, and then, just
move around it because it's a sphere, it doesn't actually matter which way you're viewing it from.
If we decide to scale our cube ironically, because it looks nothing
like that, we can see down in the lower-left the Scale
by which it needs to go up by is about 0.16 or
0.17, in order to match the same actual size
of the sphere we're working on. So there we go, there's three different
types of sphere to rack your brain around! Now one final thing
on this cube, because I've just spotted it by
looking at this wireframe, actually. So let's hop back over into
Solid Mode and hop into Edit.
Now you see,
here in particular and in four places along
the top and bottom, are the remnants of it being a cube, so you
can never really get away from the fact that that was a cube. You can see it
straight away here that it in fact was a cube, because you've
got these points joining together, but it's still spherical in shape.
Now, the great thing about doing this is, you end up with
a mesh topology that's all quads, rather than all
triangles, which has its benefits later on.
So I feel a challenge coming on!
I would like you to choose a sphere type
and make a ball! So choose your sphere type,
and the way that should be guiding you is, you should be
thinking about the placement of finger holes. Which one of those
three, that we've just been through, will enable us to equally space
finger holes, without causing us any problem?
So try out all three spheres, think about equal spacing for
our finger holes.
Now, according to Wikipedia, a bowling ball's
diameter is somewhere between 21.59 and
21.83 centimeters. Wonderful! So do
pick an appropriate scale to work in,
as we've done before with our pin. Finally, make
that sphere, and we'll cover the finger holes next. So don't worry about
making those, at the moment, we'll do that in the next lecture.
Pause the video now, and give that a go!
OK guys, welcome back! Let's hop over into Blender!
So let's think carefully about our
sphere that we're working on. Well we want equal spacing.
Now, we can see by looking at this sphere, which is made from our
sub-divisioned cube, we can see that is not even.
It does vary, our mesh topology varies, and it
gets closer and closer in funny shapes. It's not all complete squares,
as it goes around it can't possibly be that, and it ends up at funny
points here, so that would be no good for making our pin! So
I'm going to hide that, by clicking the eye over here. Oh,
I can't do that, because I'm not in Object Mode. So let's get rid of that! Let's have a look
at our UV Sphere! Now, this is great for globes
or perhaps an eye, by the looks of things, because things meet
at a pole at the top and bottom. However, again
this isn't evenly spaced! If we look at
some of the squares running around the middle they're squares, and as we come up to
the top, they're no longer there. So that would be a real
pain to work with, if we wanted evenly spaced stuff. So that leaves
our final one, which is the Icosphere! And looking at this,
anywhere we want we've got lovely segments,
and it's even across its entire surface, so we will work with our
Icosphere! Now, I'm going to work to
2.6 Blender units, and that will actually align it to
the same scale that our bowling pins are at,
as well, so it's a 10 times scale. So let's do that now!
So I'm going to scale it up evenly on all axes.
Because it started at one, I can just do
2.6. That's right! And
there we go, we have our bowling pin at times
10 of real size, at 2.6, so again, it fits on our plain nice
and neatly.
And there we go, we've created our sphere
at an appropriate scale, ready for our finger
holes, which we will make in the next lecture! See you soon!