[Bf-funboard] Rotoscoping, image-planes or background

Thorsten Wilms bf-funboard@blender.org
Sat, 16 Aug 2003 15:21:47 +0200


Hello everyone,

Since this my firts post here:
My name's Thorsten, I'm studying industrial design in Wuppertal (Germany). I take an huge 
interesst in interaction / interface design and 3d. It's very nice to have such a powerfull tool 
like blender all free (speech and beer). It's even nicer to have the possibility to influence 
it's future (or even be a part of it).

Recently I tried to model something human-like, and that brings me to the reason of this post:


At the moment, you can use just one image as a background that appears on all views (top, rigt,  
left ...).

For rotoscoping with 2 or more images (very helpful for character modeling) you must stick to    
mesh-faces with uv-mapping. It's alot of work to setup and you can only see the images in Alt-Z  
mode. So you can't see the image and work in wire-mode. You have to put those faces on a layer   
and disable it for rendering.

I can think of 2 solutions:

1. A new object: image-planes like implemented in wings. They can be manipulated like normal     
planes. Images assigned to them are scaled proportionaly. They don't appear on renderings but you 
can see the images in all view-modes.

2. Background-images per ortogonal view. So you can have different images for top, right, front, 
etc.. It should be possible to move those images on their planes to make them fit together for   
modelig on the center of the 3d space.

The second solution means no extra objects to be handled in your scene, but the reference images 
can only be seen in exact numpad-views. Images-planes could be used with any inclination for more 
sophisticated uses of reference images (don't know if that's realy practical). And sometimes it's 
helpful to view 2 reference images (like front and side) and your model from an apropiate angle.

Any of the 2 would be a great improvemnt for me, but maybe implementation of both would be 
optimal. What do you think?


---
Thorsten