Welcome to Importing Reference Material! In this
video we are going to go through the fact that there are two ways of
importing reference material. There are basically background
images and textured planes. Now, because we know
nothing about texturing, at the moment, we will be using background
images, and they also give us a fundamental control, whereas
planes can be a bit more tricky to get right. So let's
hop straight over into Blender and experiment with
background images! Now, there are two ways
of doing background images in Blender, and
one of them is really simple and one of them is a
few more clicks and simple. So I'll show you the menu option, first of all.
So if you haven't already got it open, you'll need to open the
Properties Pane, by pressing even the N key. I pressed and clicked on the little
+ and opened up this Properties Pane of
the 3D Editor. Now, if we scroll right down towards the bottom,
there's a section called Background Images. Now we
can click to make a tick in this box
and expand this option and we can add an image. But before
we go and do that, I would like to quckly show you the other way of bringing
an image in. And if you go to any image
on your computer,
for example, I've got an image example here; I can click and
drag it straight into Blender. Just close down Finder there,
and we get a similar show as we've got here. We could have just
opened up our Background image. Now, there's a lot of information
in this view here. So the first thing we're going to cover is the
fact that I can't see my image. Where is it? Well there
are two constraints for a background image. You must
be using an orthographic projection, so let's go and
set Orthographic Projection now. So I still
can't see my image! You have to be looking along one of the
X, Y, or Z axes, so you could look at it from the Front, Top, Bottom, Left,
Right, etc. So if we switch the view now to Bottom,
we can see, hey thumbs up! We can see it! If we
switch to Left, it's there as well,
and if we view it from the front, it's there as well! So
that means that it's on all of our axes, and we can change that with our
first dropdown here. So I'm just going to expand the
Properties Pane, so we can just see what's going on here. So it's an image,
that's fine! It's All Views, so we can actually control
here where we can see the image and where we can't. I'm going to
leave it on All Views, for the moment, because that's fine for the purpose of this
exercise. Source image, it's a Single Image. That's absolutely fine.
That's where we can find the image, which is great, ImageExample.
Going down. So Opacity, now depending on the
darkness or lightness of your image, this basically fades this away into the
background, so it's less so it's not as strong on the screen. Of course,
100% Opacity means that you cannot see the model
at all. Now we can see it's at the back, at the moment, so let's zoom in a little
so I can see what's going on! Now we have our cube here,
our default cube, and we have the image
behind it, so if we have anything on the screen.
So if I scale our cube up a little, you can see that our background
image is behind that cube.
If I had moved it to the front, it's always going to be in front of whatever
geometry you're working on, and this is where you may want to play with the
Opacity, so that you can still see your geometry.
Now, in general, you'll probably want it set to Front
so you can see the reference material itself and so it's not
hidden.
What does this X thing do? Whoah, it
moves it along this X axis! What does the Y do? Well,
in this case, it does move up or down and that's a little confusing with the way
we're viewing it, because that's actually the X Z axis,
at the moment. But essentially, that's going to move it up or down, and those
are, of course, Blender units! Then, we have our two options here to
Flip Horizontally and Flip Vertically as well. It doesn't like
being flipped vertically, as we can see there. And finally, we've got
two down at the bottom, so you've got a scale there with the
Size modifier, and finally Rotation so we can
rotate it around at a set angle. So that's great! We've got
our background image there! I think we can now do
a challenge!
I would like you to import, into our Blender file,
the PinReference.png and set that
as the background image. I'd like you to make
sure that it's only visible from the front,
and get the image as up front as possible. I've noticed
that the image itself is slightly wonky to one way or
the other. I can't remember which way it is. Now, bear it in mind that the real
pin is 38 centimeters in height. I would like
you to think about the scale that's going to be
appropriate to what you're doing in Blender. So
pause the video now and import the pin
and scale it accordingly.
OK welcome back! Let's hop over into
Blender!
OK so here we are in Blender!
So let's go and import our PinReference! So I'm going to go down to
Background Images and Add an Image. Just
scroll down some more and click Open. I've stored mine
in my Donwloads folder. I suggest you store yours in a Project folder.
And, first of all, I'm going to just set it to the
Front axis. I can't see it, at the moment, because I'm not looking
by the Front, and I'm still in Perspective. So let's change it to Orthographic
Projection and move around to the Front.
So there is our pin! Now, arugably I could do the
rotation now, while it's much larger. In fact, I think I will! Let's just
rotate it by a degree. Em, that looks much better to me!
Excellent! So let's use a cube
or another bit of reference material, it doesn't matter, as a
guide, if you will, to scale this reference image. So I'm going to get
rid of that one thats there, and I'm going to create
a new object, it doesn't matter what it is.
I'm going to create a Cube. Why not? The Radius, so the Radius,
that cube's actually 2 in height. So it's
going to work to a scale of say 3.8 Blender
Units. I'm thinking about it. We don't really want it very very
small, we need to work with it. So that's nearly 4, so half of 4 is
2, so we need 1.9 on our Radius.
Now that's perfect! That's now the correct height! What we
can simply do is go back to here to our scaling, and we can't see which
one's scaling, at the moment. Here we go, Size and let's just
all the way down, and we can't see it any more.
So let's bring our... Here we go! Let's bring our image to the front. Ooh, that
looks like it's worked perfectly! So 1.2 seems to be spot
on! I'm happy with that! So there we go, we've got our reference
material imported, straightened up, and to the
right size to work with in Blender.
Let's move on to the next lecture!