[Bf-committers] Reference Images Proposal

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

Campbell and I discussed this a bit further. Using a mesh is less
drastic a design change, but actually making this work well will
probably be more complicated code, while at the same time being less
easy to use. Also using it as a clone image for painting would be
considerably more complicated to implemented for arbitrary meshes.

What we agree now a reasonable solution now is to add a new "image"
object type. The object.data would be a pointer to an image datablock.
Adding a new object type doesn't not seem to be all that complicated,
though it hasn't been done in about 10 years (when IKA's were replaced
with armatures :).

One thing that bothers me is that users will want to render this ..
but maybe it's a matter of naming / communicating things clearly? Also
the intention would be to replaced background images entirely, would
this be acceptable? It's more flexible in how you can position things
and it's easier to position too. Another difference would be that the
reference then appears in all 3d views which may be considered a good
or a bad thing (you can use layers to work around it).

What do you think?

Brecht.

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> using meshes for reference images can work but it doesn't lend its
> self for certain use cases...
> - quad is not necessarily rectangular
> - quad may get subdivided later and not be a single quad.
>
> Example of why this is important is: a often requested feature is to
> be able to overlay an image in projection paint and use stamp from
> this image.
>
> If we just use any mesh we have to...
> - tell project paint to use an arbitrary mesh as a reference image,
> some way to select reference object.
> - complain if the reference image is not a rectangular quad
> - make it clear to the user they can use xray and 'transp' object draw
> options to draw the reference image over the mesh.
> - have a way to force texture draw for mesh objects.
>
> While all this can work it really feels hobbled together and not a
> nice way to use reference images, so its worth thinking of how we
> could make it smoother.
>
> Perhaps we keep existing background images but have a way to give then
> an absolute transformation in 3D space, and have some modal operator
> (transform or its own operator), for moving them about, or simply have
> some operator to place based on the location of an object.
>