brillient and easy way to model a basic buckyball (football)

I’ve been looking for a way to model a bucky ball for ages (almost since I’m using blender). I’ve seen many tutorials for other programs that could also used in blender but those were long and annoying. Today I stumbled by accident in a very easy method to make basic bucky ball geometry, so here we go:

  1. Add an ico sphere level 1.

  2. bevel it (w key >> bevel) a lot (bevel size should be 1.8 and above - the more the better). note that the result of this stage is already a bucky geomtry, but it’s not a football/c60 molecule yet.

  3. Smooth the result alot (w key >> smooth, the sphere will get smaller).

  4. Use the “to sphere” option in edit menu (f9). note that the corsure should be in the middle of the sphere!

  5. Recomended: repeat stages 3+4 a couple of times.

  6. Repeat stage 2.

http://img15.exs.cx/img15/6302/buckytuy.jpg

Congrats now you have basic buckyball/soccer ball/football/c60 molecule. you may have to adjast some of the hexagons and pentagons. Best way to do that is by deleting the middle vertic, selecting the paramter and scaling it down to 0.0.

Interesting and fast technique!
Why don’t you use ico sphere level 2 in the first place. Wouldn’t that make steps 2 to 4 unnecessary and therefore be even faster?

BTW, a real soccer ball consists not only of pentagons but of hexagons a well. But that’s just a minor problem because your ball looks believable and that’s what counts. It could be a bit more round though.

Nice technique.

How about this ‘technique’.

Open Scripts Window
Scripts>Mesh>Geodesic Dome 1.4
Push ‘BuckyBall’ button

:slight_smile:

Sweet. :slight_smile:
But it doesn’t seem to be in 2.34 official, does it?

I’m not sure.

I guess I may have added it to my scripts directory later.

Great script made by Andy Houston/serendipity in case anyone is interested. (lots more features besides just bucky balls).

mmmm… I’ve never manneged to creat buckies with geodisic dome script… probably cause I used an old version :slight_smile:
oh well… I always liked doing things my own way… and I geuss the joy of finding a way by accident…

the football is not perfect!