mosaics fall from sky

[helenistikyay]

hi everyone

i need to do an animation about a picture

a picture consists of mosaics

and almost 10.000 of mosaic fall from sky

and they must fall like rain

 

as yo see pic below

i started to draw mosaics one bye one

then i'll try to assign the pic to all mosaics and use an UVW map

but i have no idea how i will make them fall like rain

10.000 mosaics

 

thanks for help

[Horhe]

Look into particle flow.

[helenistikyay]

i tought that too but, the mosaics places are set before

i m trying to simulate a real mosaic work

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think Neoscape has a script where windows fly into place on a building facade. Look for that, it may solve your problem easily. Then again, it may not.

[Dave Buchhofer]

or look through allan mckays site, he has a little video tutorial on there somewhere about doing fractured ground with meshes via particle flow.. that'll get your tiles as particles, after that you could just float them away (backwards)

[helenistikyay]

this is what i did from till now 2500 mosaics

and i need 10,000 more

there has to be an easy way

if anyone knows

i really need help

[Dave Buckley]

not too sure, as already mentioned a complex particle setup would be the answer, but if you keep going then i've gotta hand it to you. you've got some extreme patience to get as far as you've got already

[helenistikyay]

this is the original mosaic

as you see

the mosaics shape is not equal

[anton]

You should try to make your life easier by choosing a camera angle or some well thought edits that would minimize the amount of work...

 

If you don't have to have them perfect you can get that image in illustrator and try to vectorize it. It'll give you some shapes to play with.

Also there is a script written by Bobo that would take an image and for each pixel it would create a box with a certain color assigned to it (don't remember the name of it but I can dig it up for you).

 

For the rain, definitely a particles setup would be the best but you can also do that with a bit of scripting. What I would do is to animate a couple tiles falling the way you want it and then through maxscript you could just assign the animation to the rest of the tiles and randomly changing the start frame of the animation, giving the impression of rain.

 

Another way to model this is by starting with 1x1 plane, convert it to editable poly then start shift dragging the edges to create new faces. Then select all the faces, inset them a tad and invert the selection and delete. That way you end up with just the right planes. Once you have that just map it and collapse the mapping then explode all the faces as single objects.

 

Hope this helps!

Edited June 16, 2009 by anton