Creating A Holiday Ball

This tutorial will teach you how to create a holiday ball from polygonal primitives.

Set-up

Step one - First, open the attributes editor (window>attributes editor); we'll be using this a lot in this tutorial.

Step two - Create a sphere and, in the attributes editor, go to the tab polySphere. Set your Subdivisions Axis and Height to 20.

Step three - Select the faces around the very top of the sphere. Scale them out so they are a wider base for our stem.

Step four - With the faces selected, extrude the faces upwards. Use the Move Tool instead of the Universal Manipulator because the Manipulator will cause the faces to go up like a mushroom because the Manipulator moves along a faces normals.

Creating The Cap

Step five - Create a cylinder and, in the attributes editor, go to the polyCylinder tab and set the Subdivisions Axis to 12 and the rest of the attributes should stay at 1. Also, delete the bottom faces of the cylinder.

Step six - Select every other vertex along the base of the cylinder and move them upwards. This will give our cap a bit more detail.

Step seven - Select the top faces and extrude them up so they look like the image below.

Step eight - Now use the Insert Edge Loop Tool (edit mesh>insert edge loop tool) and set the Maintain Position to Multiple Edge Loops. Set the number of edge loops to 2. Add edge loops all the way around the cap. We do this so, when we smooth it, this it doesn't lose it's shape.

Step nine - Now add an edge loop horizontally around the cap.

Step ten - While we're still in the edge loop, go down to the main ball and, on the stem, add one horizontal edge loop.

Step eleven - Now move the cap down so it sits on top of the sphere.

Step twelve - Create a torus and, in the attributes editor, set the settings to the image. Then move and rotate it so it's sitting in the right position.

Step thirteen - Create another torus and set the settings to the image below. Then move and rotate it so it's sitting in the right position.

Now select the ball and the cap and go to mesh>smooth. Now that it's smoothed, assign shaders to it to add color. I used blinns and Mental Ray materials. This tutorial will not go in depth on how to color it. If you want a Mental ray tutorial, please see my tutorials page on my website.