hi there, thanks for the comment. i have been working with Lightwave for 2 years. but its just been the last year i been working serius with it. The soocer ball took some minutes. its not hard. A tip for you is to just get to know the modeler, making stuff, testing. Then look for Tutorials. Philip have made good tutorials that you can download. There are other places were you can find them. like
www.3dlinks.com.