1. Before you open up 3dsm, open up a paint program, such a photoshop, and create an image of any color choices and amounts that you wish. For my image, I chose red, white, blue, yellow and green. Only 5 colors - but then these colors will be tiled in 3dsm.
I do not wish to give a tutorial on how to make the image in photoshop, for it is simple to do, and I assume most users of 3dsm already have a knowldege of photoshop.
this is the image I made in photoshop as a reference. If you want to save time, save this image and use it for yourself.
2. Open up 3dsm. Create a sphere. adjust size as neccessary for the scene you will use the ball in. Click on the modify tab. For segments - you can acheive a "smoother" ball by increasing the number from 32 ( default ) to 50 or higher. [warning - when making large scenes - it is not always advisable to increase segments - for it slows down the program and render times - but since this is one single ball, its ok to do]
3. Open up material editor. Highlight a new gray sphere, and open up MAPS. click on the word "none" for diffuse color.
Choose BITMAP at the top of the list, and search your harddrive for the image you made in photoshop ( or my image from above )
4. You will now see the beach ball texture applied onto the gray sphere. Make sure to apply it to youre ball in the scene by either clicking the apply button or dragging it onto the ball.
Give it a quick render. Looks good huh? But, you don't just want 5 stripes do you? Lets double the amount, to 10 stripes. We can do this by tiling the texture twice in the U direction ( i.e. x-axis)
While still in the diffuse color map, see where it say tiling? make the U tiling 2 instead of 1. V tiling would increase the tiling in the y direction, but since this pattern is solid thoughout in the y direction, adjusting the V number wouldn't change anything.
5. Last but not least, a beach ball would require some shine to it. So we need to go back to the parent material
then adjust the specular level and glossiness. I chose 55 specular, and 20 glossiness.
6. That's it! your final render should look like this
More 3D Graphics: 
