[Bf-committers] Reference Images Proposal

[Matt Ebb]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Brecht Van Lommel <brecht at blender.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't think this is a good idea, it really sounds like an abuse of
> the concept of an empty to me, and a special object type for this also
> seems too specific. Why not just use an mesh with a texture applied
> and add the option to always show an object in a certain draw mode
> somehow (which is different than what the current option does).

-1 from me too, I agree with Brecht. Textured planes can be used
easily here, that's how its done in most other applications too. A
while ago I started writing an add primitive script 'Add Image Plane'
that when executed would open a file selector, and automatically map
the chosen image to a plane with the right drawtype etc. Pretty
trivial stuff and not worth coding more and more complexity into
Blender (especially on empties either) just to support this.

Campbell wrote:
> I ended up forcing wire for the objects I was modeling and then only
> having the quads as textured, but it was tedious to setup.

We talked about this at winter camp - the problem here is that
Blender's 'Maximum draw type' concept is really inconvenient to work
with in a lot of ways. It would be a lot easier to just be able to set
your reference planes as textured, and they would *stay* textured in
other global display modes.

cheers,

Matt