[Bf-committers] Reference Images Proposal

[Campbell Barton]

re: people will want to render this

Of course rendering references should not be supported, just like
render grease pencil doesnt work (aside from view-port render which is
acceptable for both)

We can have Alt+C - Convert the reference into a mesh. I think this is
a reasonable way to allow rendering if people really want this.

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <brecht at blender.org> wrote:
> 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.
>>
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-- 
- Campbell