A new Monday, a new ballgag 😛

And already I’m over-engineering it. I want the ball to be swappable between various styles, so I came up with a convoluted system to show or hide the holes based on alpha masking. As if the shape itself wasn’t tricky to get right as it is 😛

There are a few advantages to this method: Only one mesh “face”, and one texture can use multiple alpha values to allow for different hole configurations in the same texture.

The 3 last pictures have a quick test texture and demonstrate the concept.

The main hurdle with this method is that I have to tweak the normal orientation of a lot of vertices to “hide” the holes when their covers are visible. You can still see them it if you look hard enough.

Texture baking also appears to be a little funky on the inside, not like it will matter too much. After all, the inside is only there to give the object depth, but it is barely visible.