So I recently watched a video from The Foundry where a ball knocks over a bunch of dominoes and when the dominoes fall the textures on the lot of the dominoes make up the company’s logo. I really wanna add this effect to my toolkit because clients will love it.
I’ve made a similar animation, and I’ve been able to successfully duplicate the result, but VERY tediously. I go to the end of my animation where the dominoes have settled, choose my image texture, put it into the uv image editor, swing over to my 3d viewer, select a single domino, and enter edit mode. I then hit U and project from view and change my mapping coordinates to UV. Then I have to do that to ALL THE OTHER DOMINOES.
There MUST be a quicker way to do this.
I can’t project to all of them unless I first join them as a single object, but then it kills the animation. I need to be able to project to multiple objects at once.
Here is the culprit! Again, using projection UV mapping in blender, I was able to emulate this. You do it by projection mapping from the camera’s final position and the end of your baked physics sim, but projection mapping each individual one sucks and takes an hour. And yeah… I did try linking texture to the first one, but it doesn’t link the projection. It just applies the material and tiles it all funny. I just need to be able to project an image onto multiple separate objects simultaneously.
Since you can’t be in edit mode on more than one object at a time, is there a way to do a projection map while in object mode perhaps?
You may be able to use a variation of the Smart Projection UV unwrapping method for your dominoes. It is designed for projecting an image onto multiple objects. In brief,
All objects should have the same material.
Select all objects to be mapped (all the dominoes).
Press tab so the last-selected object goes into Edit mode.
U-key->Smart Project. Load your image in the UV/image editor
Add an image texture to the material, select your image, map it to UV coordinates.
However, I am not sure if this will work with your dominoes in their final positions. If I recall correctly, it rotates the texture for each piece, so your logo wouldn’t appear “projected” onto the pile of dominoes but just broken up into pieces like a puzzle. I’ll dig some more.
they guy that did that video, if I remember right, said he just UV unwrapped all the objects from the last frame with the “project from camera”. which put it all nicely together… but I might be forgetting something.
edit: oops, wrong video, thought it was a different one should’ve checked first, but it is still almost the same effect. and I guess I’m saying almost the same as CD38, jumped the gun a bit I guess.
I think what you’re looking for is sticky mapping. use one material,add an image texture it mapped to sticky. go to the frame at which you want the logo to be seen. set an active camera at the point you want the image to be projected from say the top like in the domino animation. select all the dominoes and hit space bar add sticky. then you can switch the camera to a different one with a different view and the texture should stay were it is. Feel free to reply If i’m not quite clear enough.
Using the basic method I mentioned earlier I tossed this together as a proof of concept.
Although now I might try LoMac’s version which sounds like it would be a little faster as well as a lot less potential for messing up. (which i did quite a bit of…)
