Really complex object texturing, also: weird issues

Hello, Blender Artists!

I’ve been doing some experimenting with Blender recently with a goal to get me a night 'toonish cityscape. I needed it to have some radial form, that’s why I used 2.4*-only available Discombobulator script getting right what I needed:


But Blender isn’t really fond of slackers, ya know? Problems arouse - of course - when it came to texturing. I actually wanted to put a uniform texture on all walls (ending up with a stack of three, then bringing them back to one).

There are 100+ k faces, unwrapping all these boxes would make me to give myself up to a mental facility in next to no time.

After some ‘shamanistics’ I’ve ended up with Object Mapping, using a box with appropriate dimensions as texture coordinates source. This way I got what I wanted, - seemingly:


Even when it came to animating the camera (at least, initially) there weren’t any apparent texture alignment problems… But then they emerged: at FEW faces, mostly located far away from camera textures’d gone jumping. As if Blender was recomputing their alignment for every next frame - and was doing it differently every time.

So there are a few burning questions:

  • Where have I screwed up badly, other then using Discombobulator?
  • Is there NO way to texture that complex objects without unwrapping them? (I only needed walls, i.e. vertical, Z-aligned faces)
  • Are there unwrapping tools to save on time making seams manually? I’m very noobish with unwrapping, to my shame.
    Why the textures started jumping only on a few faces whilst the rest of them looked okay, no matter their orientation?

Thank you!

Have you tried using the UV Project modifier? It lets you assign a single or multiple objects (a plane for instance) to use as a projector. Perhaps it takes a little tweaking, but it’s possible to get pretty good results without much effort.

Should take a look into it, thank you!

That’s what I got in the end. Unfortunately had to do some work-around because of ‘jumping’ textures: smoke animations had been rendered before a static camera, then resulting sequence was used as a movie texture with camera flying away. Result is only tolerable (for me) due to post-production effects.

Still can’t get, why-o-why textures had been ‘jumping’ like in some old PC games from early 3D-era

Looks pretty good. Don’t know why the texture would jump around though. Did you use the UV modifier?