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Arranging photos into the shape of the Earth
Hello:
I’m still fairly new to C4D. I’m looking for some basic hints on the most efficient way to create the planet Earth with the continents made up of many small photos.
My initial solution would be to create a sphere with, say 300 segments. I could image map a world map onto that (for reference), make the sphere editable and then manually delete the polygons corresponding to the water, leaving the continents. I would then use that in a cloner object to confine the photo planes to the continents, maybe with a random effector to layer them a bit. This seems like a bit of a brute force approach. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use the luminance values of the world map to confine the photo clones to just the continents without having to manually delete the water polygons.
It looks like I have around 1700 photos to work with. Any suggestions on the most efficient way to map each image to a different clone?
Thanks for reading this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics -
4 Replies
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This might be of interest, although it’s not available yet: https://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=940694
If these are relatively high resolution images you’re talking about you are going to need a LOT of RAM for this project — not to mention a LOT of time.
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Hi:
Thanks for the reply; I appreciate it.
If using a texture map to conform the photos to the continents isn’t feasible is it possible to take vector art of the continents, Spherify that and use that in the Cloner to place the clones? That artwork would probably come in as a spline, so I don’t know if it would work.
I could shrink down the bulk of the images pretty small, like 300 x 200 or so. What I don’t know is how to assign each of the photos to its own clone. Is there a way to string those together in a Quicktime and then assign each frame to a different clone using some combination of effectors?
Shawn
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You could make the splines spherical with the wrap deformer in sphere mode.
The way bitmaps are assigned to clones is via the mograph multishader. Basically you add a multishader layer for each bitmap, but if you load a movie file into a slot you can use the “to layer” function, which will automatically split each frame into a separate layer. Then, if you set the multishader’s mode to “index ratio” it will assign the layers to clones based upon their index number. The problem then would be getting the appropriately indexed clone in the place you need it to be.
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Hi:
Thanks again for the reply. I’ll try the Spherify a vector map approach first. It’s not super important that a particular photo correspond to a particular clone, so your index ratio approach should work. I might create a separate batch of clones for the beginning when I have to show a batch of specific photos.
Shawn
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