Oh, balls
How hard is it to style a ball? Harder than you think.
A ball. Making it look nice. How hard can it be?
Hard.
Mapping a rectangular texture onto a very round sphere involves a surprising amount of maths. Ugh, maths.
Every seam is a decision. Curves that look elegant from the front can become a visual accident when the ball rotates. A balanced still can turn lopsided in motion. So: calculate, simplify, render, rotate, reject, repeat.
Compression levels and texture mipmapping joined the fight too. Details needed to look sharp up close without dissolving into noise at distance. Designing the ball meant designing for the render pipeline.
The final result looks simple. That is the trick. It took many iterations—some of them are here:
One idea had to wait: directional light from each ball’s futuristic eye. It looked a-ma-zing. With more than two balls, though: hardest imaginable PC crash 😱.
Backlog it is.
Still: much better than yellow spheres.