In this quick Blender 2.5 tip we show you how to use the Image Display mode for Empties that is available in Blender 2.58. This feature gives you a versatile way to work with background images.
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Very useful tip. Will use this tool when creating a car. Thanks
Great tip thank you!
Neato. I always hated having two copies of one reference sheet – one flipped and one normal. This will fix all of my worries.
This was a pretty cool tip. Nice to see Drake when we’ve heard him a few times already in the background of some of the tutorials.
Hi,Jonathan Williamson,
Thanks for this new very helpful tip.
I downloaded Blender 2.58, 64 bits from Blender Organization.
1.As you demonstrated, I,applied the “front image” to empty.Very good quality image appear.(Image size 1200X1800).
2.I, created another emty to apply “side image”,(image size= 1200X1800)
The following, I observed.
The Blender system slows down to crawling.If I delete side image,Blender system come back to normal function.
The side image appear too small compared to front image.I have to rescale it to match it with front image.
I don’t know,is this blender new function bug? or it is related to my own window 7 related fault.Some one please check and share your experience.Thanks
Hi there,
My Blender is busy rendering at the moment *teehee*. I’ll certainly run a few tests for you when I’ve got a spare minute.
Are you using the official 2.58 release or a more recent build from GraphicAll? If a more recent build, what revision number?
Speak soon!
great new feature
just what i needed
You love your Drakey, don’t you! ^-^ lol Thank you for the very helpful tip!
Very cool tip, thanks Jonathan!
there is script ‘add image as plane’ but it’s good another script turned to be a feature inside base program. The less scripts makes Blender more complete and it’s great:)
The main advantage with the Empty images over the image plans is that the empties won’t render.
-Jonathan
Another great thing about empty images over image planes, is you can go into wireframe and your reference images are still there.
Hi,
More information.
Blender 2.58,r37702
Readme file with in package says,
“The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.58. This release is the second official stable release of the Blender 2.5 series”,
Very usefull feature!
Great! Thanks again Jonathan.
Great tip, Jonathan! And you’ve got a beautiful husky.
I am very partial to him
-Jonathan
He looks more like a Malamute than a Husky?
Great feature !
Will definitively use this when creating my next car model.
That’s pretty cool. I wonder if one could model your spaceship easier this way (I actually haven’t gone through that tutorial yet)?
wish i knew about this yesterday
I was trying to work this out when they released 2.58.
I tried materials and textures; I didn’t think to try the draw method.
Thank you for the tip.
this is a really cool and helpful feature…
An idea to streamline backgrounds: there should be a tool that allows the user to align the background images. First, the user would place “control points” on the various background images. Then, the feature would scale, translate, and rotate those images (which would have to be complementary views, e.g. left and right) so that those control points became aligned nicely.
You did not mention the best thing with this feature. You can turn on x-ray on them and with a little transparency the images are semitransparent on in front of your mesh.
Thanks for the tip, I think it might be time to give car modeling another shot! I’ve had pretty miserable experiences with car references not lining up in the past and this is definitely a large improvement.
Also, I thought I’d mention that you can make the empties unselectable by toggling the cursor icon in the outliner. Which might be handy to keep them out of the way whilst modeling.
I’m still waiting for being able to zoom an image at 1:1 scale.
This has always been the right way to add a background image when you need a reference for modeling. Some apps have had this since the beginning. Nice to see it done, finally.
Thanks for this !!
Why not doing a complete overview of the 2.58 release like this one (?) :
http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/04/13/blender-2-57-is-released-video-overview/
I was tempted but the feature list is relatively small and so I didn’t feel it warranted a full video coverage.
-Jonathan
How do I get the view port. I cant seem to put a picture into my view port. Any suggestions?
Is there image maximums to what can be allowed to display on an empty? Like a certain KB max? or a certain size max? or maybe even a limit on the type of image? I tried doing this tip with a image and the image is 78.2KB and is 600×900. Am I doing something wrong? I will keep working on it every so often until I hear back from someone, until then I will have to stick to the old way of having a background image instead of an empty.
I don’t believe there is any limit on the image size. Are you getting an error or is the image simply failing to display?
Nice tip!
Helpt me a lot
-bert
ok, why won’t this work : i can add teh Empty and put an image on, but i can’t get it to scale/rotate etc using the R/S cursor onscreen :-/
TIA
oh well, many hours of annoyance later : need to have Prop editing selected.
spoke too soon, re-opened my doc and can’t adjust the damn empty at all. can anyone give me a quick bullet-point list or something about what settings you’re supposed to have, i must be doing something obviously stupid
cheers
As much I’d like to use the empties with images as a reference, there’s just too big impact on performance on this desktop. Any ideas how to improve the viewport speed with image empties? I’ve already disabled mipmaps and anisotropic filtering on on the user preferences.
Having the same image files as viewport background images seems to have no impact at all on performance.
My setup is: GeForce GT 520 / 4GB RAM / Intel Core 2 @ 1.86GHz.