I’m looking for some advice/guidance on how to go about displacing (for want of a better word) specific sections of a video.
What I’m after: The highlighted area in the attached image to break up into small squares that shift outwards from their positions, leaving behind an alpha ‘portal’ of sorts, which would be used to reveal a different video beneath (hopefully that makes some kind of sense!)
What I’ve tried: Mapping the video clip as a movie texture to a subdivided and UV unwrapped plane. The problem I’m having with this is that the UV map is an absolute mess, and the subdivisions so numerous that manually adjusting the map would take forever.
Essentially, am I way off track here and there’s a far better solution, or am I on the right track but need a better approach?
I would say you are on the right track. If the geometry is just a flat plane, then you should go in front view (or whichever ortographic view is aligned with the plane) and unwrap it using “project from view”. Then, you scale and position the entire UV island over the texture without deforming it.
@etn249 's solution will work if you want to do this in blender, but let me just say- doing this in blender is probably the hardest possible way to do it. Using a software designed for this purpose like After Effects or DaVinci Resolve would be way simpler. Of course, learning a new software might take more time in the end after all, but if you already know one of them, I’d use one of those for sure
Make a grid, map the image onto the grid, then separate the faces you want to manipulate ( select faces >> P >> selected ). Then separate all the faces of the new object from each other. Now you can animate those individual faces same as any object. To make the shadeless material for your video, assuming you are beginning with the default material, add an image texture node, load the video into it, specify your frame range, then delete the principled BSDF shader, and plug the image texture node directly into the material output node.
Yeah I’m coming from an Ae background (started with Blender about a year back), but the problem with using it for this purpose was that I want to be able to manipulated the squares’ individual rotations/scales/positions in 3D space, which I couldn’t find an elegant solution for in Ae. That said, I’d be super interested to hear any suggestions you have on that front
Thanks, Modron. Yeah, that’s how I’m mapping and animating everything, it was just how to get the mapping to be accurate to the source video, which etn249’s solution resolved perfectly.
I was just sort of adding to what he said. My method assumes the grid is already UV mapped ‘from view’. The UV coords will stay intact after you separate your faces.
