Hello there!

The title says it all.. Maybe you guys can help me!

My goal is to achieve hunderds of pictures falling into the shape of a company logo that fades into the ‘real’ logo. (of course with an awesome camera animation etc, etc.)
Not only do I want to have hundreds of photo’s proportionally mapped onto the polygons, but I also want to be able to control the time parameters of where and when my polygons are in time.

A very simple and fast made example of the ‘type’ of animation is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H50jk7gJD0Y

(this is just a plane, eventually i want to have a 3d shape with the same type of animation!)

As you can see, the animation has somewhat of a curve, building up towords the end.

Now my question: How can I, without hand animating hunderds, maybe thousands of polygons and then manually assigning a different photo to each of the polygons, create this animation?

I had a fairly simple but timeconsuming solution for the animating process:

- model the company logo in 3d
- clone the logo and detach all polygons to ‘elements’
- place the polygons in the air, the ones that need to ‘fall’ first low, the ones that need to ‘fall’ last, high.
- morph the shape of the second logo to the first over the timeline.

This however, is not a good solution, nor is it very user friendly..
Not to mention, I still don’t have a good solution for the automated assigning of random photo’s (from a folder maybe) to the polygons.
If there are not enough photo’s available, some photo’s need to be used more than once…

Maybe I need to use particleflow?

Can you guys help me with this modern day quest?

Thanks!

	Video

Are the photos all about the same size or proportion or are some wider or longer than others? And are they named in a sequential order or just randomly named?

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

Do it back wards.

Start with the logo as a 3D object.
Animate it’s Opacity at the same time animate a Vol.Select on a non-renderable emitter for the particles.
Render to sequential image files.
Compile to a movie in reverse order.

The example uses Particle Array.

For many different images you need to create a Multi/Sub-Object material. One Material ID is used for each particle emitted per frame.

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

	Attachment
mpg2002_small.mov

A MAX Test scene file using 2010.

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

	Attachment
tparraytext2010.zip

if you are using 2010, you can use the multi sub map and place each image in the submap locations and distribute them randomly. max should randomise the images used onto the seperate objects.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit