Making of "The Football"

Hi guys just wanted to do a quick one, you can see it as a tutorial or a tip, the pictures I have here are the step by step explanation of how I came about the final scene.
The ball is key in this scene, I started off by creating a hydra 

-Modeling-
*create>extended primitives>Hydra 
*under the parameters rollout -set the family to Dodec/Icos-
and family parameters,set P-30 and let remaining value at default
*right click on the Hydra in the viewport and convert to Editable poly
*in the modify panel,under the selection rollout select Edge and select all Edges of the Hydra right click and Split.
* in the modify panel,under the selection rollout select Polygon  and select all Polygon faces of the Hydra right click and add a tessellate modifier. under the Tessellate parameters rollout #operate on polygons and set your iterations to 2
*add a Spherify modify to get back smooth Hydra
*add an Edit poly modifier
*under the selection rollout select Polygons and select all Polygon faces
*under edit polygons rollout select the small box in front of the Bevel button.
*set the Bevel profile to Local Normals
Set the Height to 0.8
set the Outline to -0.5
and press ok to accept the settings.

-Texturing -
*convert to Editable poly
*under the selection rollout select Element and select all the 5 sided Ngons, and apply a black material from your material editor
press Ctrl+I to invert the selection to select all the six sided Ngons and apply a white material from your material editor and we are done.
I used photoshop to create the dirt on the ball, by simply using the brush tool to paint on a white canvas, which I used instead of a plain white material.

-Plants-
after I created the ball I used a plugin to create the trees,grasses and bushes.

-Lighting and Rendering-
I litup he scene with a mental ray daylight system using Mental ray sun and Mental ray sky with an HDRI I rendered from vue Xstream for the sky box.
hope this helps.
contact me for additional info shawlaedu@gmail.com
Thanks
Edu Shola