well, they did it! they’ve actually created a worthy successor to R2-D2. IMHO that is. the thing’s cute as hell! so naturally I had to model one. 
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this is my first time that I have made a high poly model without subsurf modifier - at all!! only high poly mesh. I’ve created details by modeling on top of an icosphere with shrinkwrap modifier. every part of the larger ball is separate element. I didn’t cut into one single ball object. cuts for paneling were created with either insetting a row of faces or with use of booleans. those cuts around cameras I did by connecting some circles around the camera opening with straight edges to get the shape, ALT-Fing it with the head mesh, beveling to get some width and the insetting. the topology is ugly when looking in edit mode, but when shaded smooth and with autosmooth enabled it produces very clean look with sharp edges in object mode. since this is hard surface model which won’t get deformed I didn’t clean up most of ugly polygons because the shading is nice and clean.
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Really nice! I love BB-8 and can’t wait for the movie!!! Nice model
nice model!! i love the textures
now, I do like to test how believable my modeling is by photoshoping a model onto a photo and publishing it on Facebook with some background “story” and then observing reactions. this time I said I bought and assembled a scale model of BB-8. the story is meh, but my friends know that I do 3d modelling so the droid had to look really good for this to work. nice way to push myself further…
result? BIG WHOOP! 2 likes and 3 comments. talking about anti climax… 
either nobody cares about droid toys or they’re onto me. oh well… at least I think the photos look good. tell me what you think. only the droid and box are CG, the rest are photos of my living room…
This is some really nice work! Interested how you kept the spherical shape during the modelling. Did you just shrink wrap it?
yep. I used icosphere, because of its uniformly spaced vertices, with very high subdivision to ensure smooth shape for shrinkwraping. I started with those orange rings, by shrinkwraping a high poly circle. I roughly matched the size according to reference image, then extruded it to get some width and added a lot of edge loops to get nice curve. I’ve created shapes between the rings by connecting circles and managing spacing between vertices to get nice clean mesh. it was a lot of fiddling, might have been quicker to use low poly mesh and then apply subsurf but I wanted to build it that way for training. when I was happy with the shapes I’ve applied shrink wrap so I could extrude them inward for depth.
This is a really incredible model! I have been trying to make such a model myself for months and I haven’t figured out how to make a nice, neat, clean mesh that has all of the panels, divets, and indents in it. I later want to be able to animate the panels so they can pop-out of the body or transform. I’ve been trying to model the outlines of the panels and knife projecting them on subdivided planes or shrink-wrapping the indents around a round-cube and using boolean into the round-cube, but working with it from there hasn’t been easy.
Do you have any pictures of your process step-by-step? Would like a little more insight if you don’t mind.
Thanks! Very cool again!
oh man, I’m sorry for not seeing this sooner. unfortunately I don’t have any WIP screenshots. I’ve described my workflow in a comment above. other than that there was a lot of vertex pushing and manual connecting what needed. not extremely efficient but it did the trick… 
one !!! this is really amazing
2!!! i like the textures, even though thyr just for the dirt and metal shading ,because your obviously not using a normal map
i get scared of high poly models, because i have an old pc which will lag if i add more details
Você pode disponibilizar o arquivo para download??