Completely lost on how to create this orb

pbacot

Nice, TIG. I kept working along those lines myself but it would either crash the computer or look like crap... I will be interested to use exactly the steps you have. I perhaps made the mistake to create my first sphere with Artisan. And I used Lattice maker. I wonder if some creasing will give sharp edged cut-outs?

TIG

LatticeMaker makes the parts as ovelapping frames which can't be easily made solid - even with SolidSolver.
Windowizer4 has similar limitations.

Here's my workflow.
Make a Geodesic sphere == I used that plugin, octahedron, 2 iterations, 1m radius.
Edited the 6 small 'sqaures' into one face...
MultipleFaceOffset == I used that plugin, 50mm offset.
Erase all faces with <=4 edges... I selected all inside the group and wrote a one-liner in the Ruby Console:
Sketchup.active_model.selection.each{|e|e.erase! if e.is_a?(Sketchup::Face)&&e.edges.length<=4}
JointPushPull == used that with 50mm offset and keeping original faces, no partitions. Makes result as a 'solid'...
Oriented the faces...
Used Artisan to sub-divide/smooth it...

nickchun

It's basically this shape(roughly, I haven't rounded all the corners) UV wrapped around around a sphere. The problem is its 5 sided. Any way to do that?

TIG

That's why it's best to start with some kind of Geodesic sphere...
Mapping an image onto a sphere is going to give you brain-ache...

MartinK

Here's an attempt. I started with a geodesic sphere from the warehouse. I don't have time to go through the steps, but I remade it with components. The model is attached if you want to explore the parts. It's not perfect and might not even be accurate, but it was a fun experiment. Hope it helps.

Test1b.skp

Mra

Wow, thank you so much for the amazing responses everyone. All these techniques are such good ideas, I'll try and build this myself using the different methods mentioned above as well to learn more complex items in SketchUp!

Much appreciated!