harkyman.com

If you want to do camera mapping in Blender, you have two choices: Sticky coordinates or the UV Project modifier. Sticky coordinates are easy to generate, but they tend to fall apart at the slightest provocation. In theory, you just drop into a camera view, put up your background image, line up your objects and make Sticky coords. They are a special kind of vertex-based uv coordinate. The problem with them is that if you move the camera in any useful fashion, they go crazy, making the stuff you’d normally like to do with camera projection not very do-able. The old solution was to use a script that baked the Sticky coords to standard UV coordinates.

I’m working on the surfacing chapter of my book, and needed to use camera projection. Sticky coordinates were not back in Blender 2.5, so I reattached them to an operator. Sticky worked again, but the old grief remained. I’ve tried the UV Project modifier, and did the tutorials, etc., again but still I just didn’t like the work flow. I’ve heard from people who certainly know better that it’s great, works right, yes yes. However, nothing is quite as intuitive to me as lining your objects up in camera view.

So, after some feedback from Brecht and Matt Ebb, I wrote a new UV unwrap type: Project from Camera. Basically, it works the way that Stickies do. Camera view + background image + tweak your objects right there in perspective. Now, instead of adding stickies, you unwrap the mesh using Project from Camera. That’s it! Now you have a UV unwrap that you can tweak if you need to, and we can get rid of stickies forever!

If you’re interested in trying it out before it’s in trunk (hopefully), bop on over to:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&aid=19862