Creating Textures for a ball

The following applies to most of my striped beach ball products, though the inside mesh section is most applicable to "Super Bouncy Fun Ball" or "Land Super Fun Ball"

Here is the map for the Super Bouncy Fun Ball:

It is probably not entirely obvious what this means. The map is applied like a world map to a globe, with the top and bottom edges forming the poles. Nearly all my meshes leave the ball slightly rolled and not standing on end.

Here is an example of a simple stripe texture:

Save it in PNG format. This will make a simple striped ball.

Ball with example texture

This is obviously not the traditional beach ball pattern.

Here is the above rotated by 90 degrees:

Save it in PNG format. This will look more like a traditional beach ball.

Ball with rotated example texture

This is more like a traditional beachball, however a ball typically has a circle at each pole so all six panels of the ball do not all come together to a point.

I've added grey "poles", these will transform into circles on the ball once the texture is applied

Ball with improved texture

Adding opacity to the ball

To add opacity we require an opacity map. An opacity map is a monochrome texture that describes how solid the object's colour will be. White indicates solid, black indicates total transparency and (if blending is selected) greys can be used to indicate varying degrees of transparency.

Here is a possible opacity map, this will make the yellow faces solid and the blue faces see-through. For this example I will remove any interior mesh and concentrate on the outside. If you are trying to replicate this section with Super Bouncy Fun Ball then you should find mesh tab "0 bteballinside" and select "Remove Mesh"

No Blending, No Two-Sided	No Blending, Two Sided
Blending ON, No Two-Sided	Blending ON, Two-Sided ON

A further enhancement is to give the see-through sections a slight texture. This gives the see-through panels a slightly "smoky" appearance that can be more pleasing than a constant opacity. I'll also replace the blue panels with white as light colours are often preferable for blended sections.

Ball with improved opacity and blue panels

Using an inside mesh

The following is more complicated and may require messing around with the mesh tab to get things how they need to be. Super Bouncy Fun Ball is configured for this by default, though if you deleted the inside mesh then you might want to re-derive.First I'll demonstrate what an inside mesh might be used for:

Lets say I was to add some text to the outside of the ball:

Then it might look like this:

Ball with improved opacity, white panels and text inside and out

Note that the writing appears on the inside and viewed from the inside it is mirrored. If the ball was printed then we would expect to see writing on the outside only.

What we need is a mesh for the ball viewed from the inside, then we could have text on the outside and the plain version inside.

View of the inside of the ball only Final ball with text on outside but not inside

Super Bouncy Fun Ball has an inside mesh. If it is to be used then the inside mesh must be listed FIRST, i.e. it must have a lower mesh index. Both sections should have two-sided deselected to prevent conflict.

In "Create mode" with my design the outside is always material 0 and the inside is material 1. As published both materials share the same opacity map. If you want to make the opacity maps different then delete the old map before adding the new one. This ensures that it gets a new filename and does not overwrite the existing one.

Here's a more extreme example, on the inside the panels are blue, giving it a much stronger effect. The outside panels are still white so the avatar inside the ball doesn't get blue-tinted. You can even make the back solid.

Final ball with text on outside but not inside, and blue back panels