High-Tech Pokéball Part II: Latch and Hinge

Time to continue building a 3D pokéball.
We left off with this in Part 1:

Neat.  But we can take it up a few levels, eh?





First, let's parent everything to the panels, then duplicate them and flip them upside-down.

We are going to build our ball around this beast.
Oh.  Making sure everything has a sensible name now will help a lot later on.  Since everything in the Pokeball revolves around the two halves, I prefix everything with an 'L' for Lower or 'U' for Upper to keep it straight.

Okay.  Now let's add a new Sphere to form the portion with the hinge.  It's gotta be big enough to surround our interior.  (I've got the display for the sphere set to wireframe so you can see, but there's no need.)  Rotate it 90 degrees on the X Axis so that it's 'looking' forward.

Select the 'cut line' where we sever the ball core into two parts, as per the last tutorial.

Note that I'm 'underlining' the area where the button will be.
Rip it.  Add your solidify, bevel, and subsurf modifiers as per the last tutorial.

Now we want to duck around back and make us a hinge.  My solution?  Delete the central vertex on the back.

Bridge the resulting gap, leaving the middle segments clear.

You can tweak the spheriness of the flat mesh there by grabbing the two middle vertices, hitting (O) for proportional editing mode, scrolling down on your mouse wheel until the influence circle is inside the circle defining the boundary for our disc, then gently pulling out on the Y axis.  Alternatively, you can leave it flat, because the hinge goes here.  Easier, yet not unrealistic.

I've attached the innards to the (as-yet hingeless) hinge assembly, then opened it up to see how it looks.  

Not bad, so far.  Don't worry about the funky star-shape on the button area; that will go away once we've added a button.

Snap the cursor to the center of the hinge area, and add a cylinder.

It shouldn't be much trouble to turn that cylinder into a hinge.  Once done, parent the halves of the ball to the hinge.

Let's do the button next.  Delete the central vertex on the button mount, then select the face loop.

Duplicate that, then move it out on the Y axis.  Tweak it until it looks like it could comfortably house a pokéball button.

Note that I use renders a lot.  I'm constantly doing little renders to make sure everything works the way I want it to.

This outward bulge on the ball is a bit hinkie -- there's no such thing in the original art, and it wouldn't have been any work at all to leave it off.  I'm adding it because I think it looks neat.

By duplicating the central edge loop of the button housing, then separating that into its own object, we've got a decent start to a button.  We'll just want to tweak the thickness, etcetera, so that we can get a little finer detail in.

The button is made by extruding the circle inward.  One of the rings is drawn quite a ways back.  It will have a light material assigned to it.

Alright then:  Here's our ball open.

You can see the button, hinge, innards... and it looks pretty good.  Now to add the shell, and make things Even More Hinky.

Move on to Part 3.