Create a Modified Cylindrical Hole in a sphere?

[jitter]

Hi, i am new to maya, I got the Maya 5 Savvy book for christmas, and I am working on the bowling animation, but i want to take it a few steps further. I am using polygons and I want to make a ball with a thumbhole, and figertip grips. For the thumbhole i made a cyclinder, stuck it into the sphere and used boolean difference and that worked fine, but i am having trouble getting the fingertips to do what i want. I made a cylinder selected about half of the faces on the top and bottom of the cylinder, subdivided them, then i selected and deleted the upper part of the subdivided faces. So i basically had a cylinder w/ a cut out shape in the middle. I tried using boolean difference, but it made a perfectly round hole on the top of the ball (it did not retain the cut out shape), but if i looked through the hole, i could see the cut out shape of at the bottom of the cylinder. I tried boolean union, this gave me the result i wanted, but i could not get the fingertip shape to line up perfectly w/ the sphere surface. There would always be a little bit sticking out or a little underneath the sphere surface. The ball looks good to the naked eye rendered, but I think if it were animated the slightly uneven suface would cause it to not roll pure. I am using 2 different textures for the ball and grips that is why i would prefer to somehow "intersect" the grips w/ the ball. What would be the best way to go about this.

Thanks

Kevin

[idagrove]

In reply to: I am using 2 different textures for the ball and grips that is why i would prefer to somehow "intersect" the grips w/ the ball.

You can texture separate faces in a single poloygon object separately.

As for your modeling question, I'm not sure I completely understand the problem, I'm having trouble visualizing it. What do you mean by "fingertip grips"? Every bowling ball i've ever seen simply has three holes, which could all be created in the same manner as the thumb hole. Perhaps a picture would help?

[jitter]

Fingertip grips are mainly for bowlers who throw a hook(curve the ball). With conventional grips the 2 finger holes are closer to the thumb hole and you put like half your finger in them. With fingertip grips, the span between the thumbhole and the finger hole is wider and you just stick your first joint into them. Fingertip grips are just rubber inserts that go into the 2 finger holes. Im trying to figure out how to post a pic at the moment. The gray (beat up ball) is a picture of one of my balls w/ fingertips. The red ball is the one i created in maya (it looks ok rendered, but the fingertips arent perfectly even with the surface of the sphere. Im trying to combine the 2 objects while trying to retain the perfect roundness of the sphere and keep the shape of the fingertips.

[jitter]

Apparently my picture insert didnt work.....Try going to

www.geocities.com/coors\_18/mayabowl.jpg

thanks again

Kevin

[jitter]

Ugh, for some reason its not letting me link directly to the picture. I had trouble trying to post a pic from geocities on another forum as well. I put the pic on this page http://www.geocities.com/coors\_18/ Hopefully it works now........Sorry for all the messed up messages

Kevin

[idagrove]

Okay, I see. The problem is that the cap surface of the cylinder is flat, whereas the surface of the bowling ball is round. I think the best solution is this: create a split cylinder (lengthwise) and do a boolean to create the fingertip hole. Then, to get the colored circle, simply use a texture map instead of actual geometry. If you want it to protrude slightly from the surface of the ball, use a bump or displacement map. It will save lots of headaches.