Texturing a dupliverted grid

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,
Is it possible to uv-texture a dupliverted grid? I have a grid, duplivert a plane to it. And then UV texture the plane. They all get the same piece of texture as the one who is parented to the grid.
I would like to have each plane to have its own part of the uv image, so i get a complete picture made out of all the planes. And when your grid is 32x32 it is impossible to do that by hand.
I know that i can make the dupli’s real, then ctrl-J to make 1 mesh and then texture it the right way. But i need all the planes to be seperate objects.
Any suggestions or workarounds?
Hope i made myself clear. Any help appreciated.

Thanx, Twan

2

Have you tried the Build Modifier, just on the Grid? You can stick a Time IPO on it too to make it run backwards.

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3

I dont understand what you mean. How can i UV texture the dupliverts by a Build modifier.

Thanx, Twan

4

to be more precise: i need to texture the dupliverts not the grid itself. So every duplivert has its own piece of the image and all together form the complete image.

Thanx Twan

5

I meant instead of using dupliverted instances, just subdivide the Grid into the same number of faces as you would have had Planes, the use the Build Modifier. I don’t know of a way to UVMap individual Duplis as they are all the same Mesh.

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6

Hi Kathman,

my suggestion doesn’t use dupliverts, so maybe it’s not what you’re looking for, but it gives you a grid of individual plane objects uv mapped so that the combined planes form the complete picture.

Basically the trick is to add a plane, uv map you image on it, and then subdivide it and separate the faces to individual objects.

The process goes like this:

  • add mesh > plane
  • UV map your image onto the plane
  • add a material, your image as texture, map from: uv coords
  • edit mode > select all vertices > w > subdivide multi, 31 cuts (gives you a 32x32 grid)
  • face select > select all > extrude > individual faces (that’s the trick to separate the faces!)
  • don’t move, just click to confirm
  • select > inverse, delete vertices (now you have a mesh of 32x32 individual faces)
  • select all faces, p > all loose parts (you now have 32x32 separate objects, uv mapped to different parts of the image)
  • object mode > select all of these planes > “center new” (F9 panel)Voilá! Hope this helps!

Happy Blending,
Björn

7

On second thought, my method might only cover the first (and easy) step - i guess you’d like to use the grid to arrange the planes, right? That seems to be quite difficult, I’ve been experimenting for a few hours now and haven’t found any way to do this (basically vertex parenting n objects to n vertices). If “make duplis real” had an option to automatically vertex parent the duplis to their respective vertices we’d be a whole lot closer to a solution.
\me thinks about hacking the source :wink: