Keep Voronoi texture look during Cell Fracture

Question

Say I have a UV sphere with a simple Voronoi texture

Now I run the Cell fracture add-on, and I get

We see that the old texture is applied individually for each cell, so the end result does not look like a fractured version of the old sphere. Is there any way to preserve the texture into each cell so that it globally looks like the old texture? Some approaches that come to mind are

• For example, a possibility would be to remove the shader from the cells, and then "project" the material from the original sphere (by scaling it up a little, perhaps). Is this doable?

• Another option would be e.g. to join the cells (in which case the original pattern is recovered, because the texture is applied to the joined object, which is essentially identical to the original sphere). Can we separate the cells again, this time preserving the texture?

Answer 1

The easiest solution is to use UV coordinates.
After fracturing the UV map is separated for each 'shard' and the texture stays in place.

^{The main downside are 'seams' along the edges of the original UV map.}

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For seamless look:

Use an empty to control the Voronoi texture :).

1. Add an Empty in the same place as your sphere
2. Change the Texture coordinates to Object > Empty
3. Now fracture your sphere, and the texture will stay the same

Now bake the result for each individual shard.

^{One solid sphere. One fractured sphere. Each has it's own empty, textures look the same}