[Bf-committers] New to blender development

[Knapp]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:30 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> @Ahmad,
>
> I'd recommend dropping into into #blendercoders, for more specific
> questions about blenders code, possible projects, or if you have any
> troubles building.
>
>
> @Knapp.
> The background image controls always seemed cumbersome to me (no nice
> way to transform or put in-front of anything).
>
> Did you try Empty-Image display feature?
>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/changelog_258#Empty_Images_Display:
>
>
> IMHO background images are a bit of a dead-end, we can have
> loc-scale-rot, front/back, flip-x/y but I don't think this gives a
> really good user experience since really you just want to be able to
> click and drag the image around too IMHO - which is what
> empty-image-display allows.
>
> Heres a more details about background display issues as I see it:
>
> http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-201290.html
>

I make space ships from images. Most of the time these are a lot like
architectural blue prints and I am laying down walls. The way it works
now is great except for the fact that as the walls and floors fill in
you can't see your image anymore. The obvious and easy answer is to
put it on top of the z-plane. I see no need for anything else in my
work flow. Making it clickable-movable would also mean it gets in the
way but if it had a lock so that you could click through it then that
would be OK. The other answer is to make it so that you can set an
alpha on your whole model (without playing with the materials etc).

Rotation is only needed when the original is rotated a few degrees
which can be a major pain in the butt (it is not to bad to do this in
gimp but it would be nice to just do it in Blender) because you lay
down walls with click-to grid turned on and you can't rotate that
without loosing the background image. Same stuff with scale. Mirror
image is more important because sometimes you need to do it flipped
one way and then flip it and do the other way (again you can do it in
Gimp)

Grabbing the image is also not very important because you can slide it
back and forth anyway with the mouse by changing those numbers with
the mouse.

IMOHO of course.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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