Nimblewill Creek Studio

Exploring the worlds around us

Creating a Bowling Ball and Pins

In the course I’m taking at Udemy.com, one of the projects was creating a bowling ball and pins.

First we had to gather our references so we’d have the correct size ratio between ball and pins, and a way to easily convert the ratio into Blender units.

Bowling Pen Layout Dimensions

Our next assignment was determining what type of sphere to use for the bowling ball. We had 3 choices: UV sphere, ico sphere, or cube (yes, a cube can be a sphere). The ico sphere seemed to be the best choice as we needed to put 3 holes in the ball at uniform intervals.

Bowling Ball in edit mode

Then we created an outline with curves and spun it to create a pin.

Bowling Pin in edit mode

So I had my first bowling ball and pin.

Bowling Ball and Pin

Then I found a diagram as a background image for determining distance between pins.

Bowling

We created additional pins using the array modifier and the diagram helped with placement.

Bowling Pin Placement

The final assignment was to move the pins into a position to appear they had been hit by the ball, then render our scene.

Bowling Ball Scene