It has been too long since I did anything with POV-Ray, mostly my
free time now goes into taking and processing astrophotos.

However, since I was forced to watch the World Cup by my Dutch
girlfriend I decided a quick render to gloat was in order, despite
my general disinterest in sports :)

The render is only part of the final picture and was tweaked
to match an existing astrophoto. The soccer ball was supposed
to be a quick CSG hack to avoid an involved model but still
took me a long time to get this crude version. It's based on
the intersection of a icosahedron with a dodecahedron but that
yields flat surface patches. I made the bright parts transparent
and placed a light source in the center to double_illuminate a
surrounding sphere which got me the rounded shape, but without
any kind of edge between the neighboring hexagons. For my
purposes I decided it was good enough to difference the shape
with slightly rotated versions of itself to isolate some
material along the edges.

For those who don't know there is actually a hexagonal storm
going on around Saturn's North Pole, which gave me the idea in
the first place. However, the isolated patches on a soccer ball
are pentagons so in the end that didn't quite pan out.

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