Keeping texture unchanged after separating pieces?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi!

I have modeled a sphere with an image of earth as the texture. I need this model of earth to consist of about 20 smaller pieces that come together (animation) in space to finally form the earth. Everything works fine until I break the earth in to pieces: I would naturally want to have it so that each piece has a part of the earth texture in it. But when I separate the pieces in to individual objects, each of them gets the whole texture and not just a part of it.

I’ll try to explain again in case I didn’t make any sense:

I want each piece to have only a portion of the earth texture, not the whole texture. One piece would have Africa, one Europe the next one USA and so on. But now each piece has the whole earth as a texture.

When I did this earlier it magically worked the way I wanted (I just pressed some random buttons and tried out stuff) but now when I’m doing it from scratch I can’t get it to behave the way I need.

If anyone can shed some light on this issue, I would really really appreciate it! Thank you very much!

2

Try using UV coordinates for the texture. UVs will not change if you break the object into smaller pieces. Using something like Orco coordinates would change depending on the size and position of the object.

3

Thank you very much!

Where do I turn on this feature (sorry for being such a newbie)?

4

Start at the following wiki page and read the next few articles (linked at the bottom of each page). This will example UV mapping and using UV textures in Blender:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/UV_Unwrapping_And_Texturing