YUDIbt

Hi, from this tutorial I am going to teach you how to model realistic high-poly volleyball. This tutorial will cover both modelling part and texturing part. And I am trying my best describe all the necessary steps one by one from the beginning to the end, so any beginner who having the basic knowledge will able to follow this tutorial without a problem.
Before starting all, it’s better to know how the volleyball looks like (if you already know just skip this paragraph). According to Wikipedia, Volleyballs are round and traditionally consist of eighteen nearly rectangular panels of synthetic or genuine leather, arranged in six identical sections of three panels each, wrapped around a bladder.
Before starting my tutorial I would like to acknowledge Thomas Suurland, because I have extracted part of my modelling procedure from his “Football tutorial”.
Let’s start. Go to Top viewport and draw a plane with, length = 600, width = 210. Set the Length Segments to 3 and Width Segments to 1.

Right click on the Select and Move toggle and set X, Y, Z values of the Absolute: World to 0 (to place the plane at (0, 0, 0)).

Get two more copies from the plane (Hold the Shift key and drag). Change the Width of middle plane to 180.

Turn on Snap toggle and right click on that. Grid and Snap Settings dialog will appear. Select Vertex option and deselect rest. Close the window.

Drag the planes and place them in a way that they are touching each other (use Snap option to move). Don’t interchange the planes; the narrow plane should be in the middle. After placing the planes it will look like a one rectangular plane. Select the middle plane, press the Object colour button and change it to another colour.
Select one plane and apply Unwrap UVW modifier. By selecting the plane, right click on the viewport and convert it to Editable Mesh. Do the same thing to other two planes as well.

Select the 3 planes and make 5 more copies from that. Then altogether there will be 18 planes (mesh objects) in 6 panels.

Now turns on Angle snap Toggle, right click on that to open Grid and Snap Settings window. Set the Angle in the General group to 30, 45 or 90.

Now you have to make a cube from these 6 panels, as they look like 6 faces of a cube. You only need to rotate and move options with snap for this. Make sure all the faces are facing outside when complete the cube. When you complete the task, rotate panels until the three strips are not parallel to neighbouring ones.

When you done that, from all sides cube should looks like this.

Now let’s apply material to the planes. Not as in early days, today volleyballs come in different colour combinations. In additionally, manufacturers print their Trademarks and different logos on the ball. To make our ball more realistic, we also need to add few logos on our ball. But keep in mind; you need more material slots when you are using more colours and logos. However in this case I am not restricting you. You can use any number of colours and logos you want. (But don’t make it fancy. You may find good combination through internet search.) This is the algorithm to find out the number of material slots you need.
No of material slots = (No of strips covered by logos)  +  (No of colours using)
I am going to use 3 colours and keep 3 strips for logos, and the number of material slots I need is 6. You can make the correct materials later, for this moment it is enough to make them different by changing their Diffuse colour.

Apply prepared materials to relevant strips (don’t worry about the cubic shape, it will getting  round later). This is how my cube looks like.

Let’s begin the rest of modelling now. Select one of the strips, and apply Edit Mesh modifier to that. Press Attach List button under Edit geometry Rollout and select all the planes in the Attach List and press Attach button (make sure there is no any other object in the scene). Now Attach Options dialog will appear. Select first option (Match Material IDs to Material) and press OK.


Now all the planes we made are attached as a single object.
Go to Face sub-object level of the Edit Mesh modifier, select all the faces (shortcut Ctrl + A) and go back to parent level. Apply MeshSmooth modifier to the object. Change the Subdivision method to Quad Output and set the number of Iterations to 2 (you may change it later if you need).

Add Spherify modifier to the object. Now the object should looks like a perfect sphere.

Then apply Face Extrude modifier to the object, and set the Amount to 5.0 and Scale to 96.5.

Then apply MeshSmooth modifier again, and change the Subdivision method to Quad Output and the number of Iterations to 1 or 2. Now the modelling part is complete. If you follow me without a mistake, you will receive a good volleyball. Render and see how it looks like, this is how my one looks like.

Now it’s time to make real materials. However the material you are using may depends on the rendering type. I am going to use Default Scanline Renderer. If you like to use my rendering setup, place a Skylight anywhere in the scene as the lighting source, and a plane just under the volleyball to receive shadows.Press F10 to open Render Setup window, go to Advanced Lighting tab and Light Tracer as Advanced Lighting method. Change Rays/Sample to 500. Keep other settings as they were.

Select one of the prepared materials, and do following changes.
1.    Set Specular Level, and Glossiness values to 0.
2.    Set the diffuse colour of the material to a colour you want. but it’s better not to use pure colours.
3.    Set the Amount of Bump map under Maps rollout to 20.
4.    Add Noise material as bump map.

5.    Change the Noise Type to Regular and Size to 2.0.

Repeat above steps to other materials as well.
Now Prepare texture maps you needed using Photoshop, and apply them as Diffuse colour maps for materials allocated for logos. Change the tiling until maps are properly place on the ball.
Render and see how it looks like.

If you faced any problem, please let me know. I would like to help you