Marble Solitaire

[Grafixman]

My latest Blender output... .
Sharp eyes might notice that the board seems to be a bit large. This is because I originally modelled it with extra holes at the ends of the cross. I noticed my mistake after everything was nearly done (actually, I was ready to post it and was Googling for the correct name of the game....) Had to do a quick remodel and rerender. Fortunately, the entire thing was relatively low poly.

[-=Drifter=-]

Wow! That's superb! So real.......

[Gare]

Hi Grafxman--

Looks very photoreal to me! Three thumbs up (I'm all thumbs).

My Best,

Gare

[Grafixman]

Thanks guys.
It started as a test on an idea of creating dents and holes on subsurfed objects. Here I am advising Gare on using materials for bump details when I am obsessed with physically modelling them myself... .
Anyway, another idea stemming from the original post. I wonder if such a thing already exists? Perhaps magnetic marbles on metal golfball sphere (or metal embedded on the holes of a plastic sphere?). Moves would be constrained on the blue area, no crossing on the yellow triangles, jumping marbles until only one is left... round and round everything goes...
Sorry for the garish color scheme. This was done on the fly with blender...
Only four white marbles are shown... too lazy to model and place them all...

[Grafixman]

Zipped .blend file:

[Gare]

Hi, Grafxman--

A little cross-pollination here:

Designing the displacement map for the golf ball dimples (there are 336, US) was a bear. Seems that a blurred circle doesn't cut it because it creates a conic, not spherical indent. So I blurred a circle then used Photoshop Curves adjustment to move the bias of what is essentially a radial gradient favoring lighter tones; a reverse S-curve. You can also do this in Xara--feather the crap out of a circle, then adjust the Profile to a reverse S-surve.

The grass is Maya Paint Effects.

My Best,

Gare

[Grafixman]

Nice golf ball, Gare. The bump map really looks good. Sharp and well defined. Using repeating textures is one way to keep the file size down, too. But I'm not sure about using it for spherical objects, though. It would do for a planar mapping, but spherical?
Yup, getting the right amount of blur is often the key to a successful bump map. I'm still trying to understand it myself.

[-=Drifter=-]

Wow!!!

[Gare]

Hi Grafxman--

No, although the golfball dimples are rendered linearly, the model space was spherical when I applied it. There are minor discrepancies, but for mapping that clearly shows detail, you can use Photoshop's Polar Coordinates filter to remap the bump or displacement map.

Here's a moon map, linear, and the Polar Coordinate filtered. Both images were spherically mapped and I used the same image map for displacement (I used Darktree simulations).

My Best,

Gare