This tutorial is written for Maya 7, but can also be done with earlier versions. The difference is that Maya 7 actually has a soccer ball primitive integrated. How cool is that? ;) For earlier versions I suggest you go to highend3d.com Maya Mel Scripts and search for geosphere. Download the GeoSphere v0.2 script.
It has a Readme.txt file that shows u how to get going.
Well.. on with the show. Create a Icosahedron with a Frequency of 3 and a Radius of whatever you want. For the same size as I am going to use for this example create it with a radius of 1.
Now, find any vertices that has 5 edges connected to it, select them and convert your selection to edges. Then hit Delete on your keyboard. After that you should be able to see what other edges you need to delete to make up the basic shape of a soccerball.
The image shows you what edges to delete, and how the mesh should look after you're done doing it.

Now.. For Maya 7 users: Go to Create Polygon Primitives Soccer Ball.
Finally Maya has got some new crazy primitives. Very convenient indeed. ;)
Go to Edge Mode and marquee-select ALL the edges of your mesh soccerball mesh. Then go to Create Sets Quick Select Set... and type in the name you want for you set. For this example I will call mine origEdges just to keep it tidy.
Click OK to make the quick selection set.
Now.. Select all the Faces of your model and go to Edit Polygons Subdivide and set the Subdivision Levels to 2 and keep it Quads.
Open the Outliner and select your origEdges quick selection set. The right click on the selection set and choose Select Set Members.
Or simply just write origEdges in the quick select box on the right side of the Status Line, and hit Enter.
By now you should have a subdivided version of your basic soccerball, and all the original edges should be selected.
With the original edges selected go to Edit Polygons and Bevel.
The image to the left shows what settings I used and approximately what the model should look like now.
See the patches yet? :)
For checking your scene should now have:

- 1622 vertices
- 3240 edges
- 1620 faces
- 3240 tris.
Let's make it a bit more round shall we? :)
With the ball selected go to the Animation Menu Set (e.g. F2 on your keyboard) Deform Create Sculpt Deformer.
Set the Dropoff Distance to 0 to keep the 2x2x2 unit size and if everything worked out your "ball" should now look more like a ball. :)
If it worked out, delete the history and let's move on.

Do the following to prepare yourself for the next step.
- Assign a new shader to the whole ball.
- Make the new shader stand out from lambert1 my making it another color.
- Go to the option box for Extrude Face (Edit Polygons Extrude Face)
- Under Local Values apply these settings for Translate: X: 0 - Y: 0 - Z: 0.009
- Deselect the ball and hit Extrude Face to save the settings.
- Don't worry about the Error message. :)and get prepared for step 5.
Copy these lines to your script editor, select all of it and MMB drag it on to any shelf.

PolySelectConvert 1;
PolySelectTraverse 1;
PolySelectTraverse 1;
ExtrudeFace;
PolySelectTraverse 1;
assignSG lambert1 pSolid1;
SelectVertexMask;

Select the center vertex of any patch and press the new shelfbutton to run the "script".
That will convert the selection to faces, expand the selection twice, extrude the selected faces (by 0.009 in its local Z axis like you typed in earlier), expand the selection once more to get the extruded faces, apply the lambert1 shader to the patch so you know who's done and finally go back to Vertex Mode.
Do the same thing to the patches around the one you just extruded. (You can press g on your keyboard to repeat the extrusion process to save some time and effort.)
If you apply a Smooth to the whole ball you will see now see the patches with seams like this image.
Undo the smooth operation and continue extruding the patches all around the ball.
You can to several at a time, just make sure they aren't next to each other, cause then you obviously won't get the seams.

That's it! You're done! What a waste of time! ;)
Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. Ha det på badet. :)
If you are interested; here is a zip'ed scene-file used in the tutorial. You can download WinZip from winzip.com to unpack it. Enjoy! :)

A 2.06 min video tutorial for this tutorial is available in Sorenson 3 codec. It's a 4.15MB download in Rar format. Go to rarlabs.com and download WinRAR to unpack it.

Tip:
If you think the seams are too ugly and sharp try subdividing (step 2) some more to even out the mesh. Just remember to add more PolySelectTraverse 1; lines in the script so your selection will expand correctly.
written by Christer Bjørklund using Alias Maya 7.0 - august 17 - 2005