Library books

[tricky]

We're doing an animation (a couple actually) where the camera moves around a library.

Libray = lots of shelves = lots of books.

Any good and quick tips for filling shelves with books. A proceedural plugin would be great (???). I wondered about modelling one simple book and then getting max to replicate it along a spline, varying the shape/size slightly. My only problem then is finding textures and mapping them all.

[studioDIM]

The best you could do, aside from mapping entire shelves at once, is to standardize the textures you are going to have to scan in, and then with a script have Max create the mapped object from looking into the textures folder.
The script might even handle the proper sizes depending on the covers images sizes and aspect ratios, and assign only one map and material to the pages inside.
Then it would be just a case of mix and match, either through scatter or similar method(particles even).

Lele

[tricky]

If I buy you a beer, would you write me the script????

[DanielBrew]

Tricky,

I got a photo of a row of books, mapped it onto a box then subdivided the box to have the the same number of divisions as there are books. Then used poly modelling in the rendered viewport to extrude and bevel until I was happy with the result.

Looked like this in the end.



I can email it to you if you want to use the mesh as a starting point.

Dan

[sv]

Amazing work as always man!
Looks great.

[tricky]

That looks really good Dan and thanks for the pointers. I might have a go at doing something like that over the weekend. (BTW your shelving units look far far better than mine )

[DanielBrew]

Thanks Steve,

I used the hue slider in photoshop to to alter the books bitmap to avoid seeing repeating patterns on the shelves. If you look carefully I think you still see repeats.

Dan

[DanielBrew]

Thanks, I'm sorry my description of what I did isn't better. I'll have another go...



Here's a pic of the mesh, the red faces are the ones I extruded to match the heights of the books. And the spines of the books were bevelled slightly for closeups.

Dan