I’m trying to load up a reference image, and whenever I do, Blender hiccups and vanishes. The manual is sketchy about the feature so I don’t know what file formats it likes, but neither .gif or .jpg have worked for me.
how big are they? (resolution size) What platform and version? You’re talking about 3D View background images, correct? Single frame or sequence? Do you have Quicktime loaded? If you have QT, GIF is supported.
Formats supported http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Output_Formats and
how to do it http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/3D_View_Options
Hiccup & Vanish = crash?
Gif won’t work, but jpg should.
What OS? All is fine here with 2.44 and Linux.
Jean
@IamInnocent: well, yeah, it works. we just have to figure out what Plasma Kat is/is not doing to let it work.
OS is XP, background image is the one of the NEC robot from Blenderart #1, assuming the sourced image from the net is the right version. Version 2.43, I’ll pick up the new version and try it again.
we need to know a little more what you meant. You mean Blender completely shuts down as if you terminated the application via Quit? If so, the image must be horribly corrupted. Can you view the image using GIMP or Paint or just the rich content viewer in Explorer?
Upgraded to 2.44 and still, it crashes.
Just to be sure, I start in 3D view, and go to the view menu at the lower left.
I can open it in windows’ image previewer fine. The crash is completely silent, no struggling or attempt to load the file, it just disappears from the taskbar instantly.
i remember this little guy! yes, that was a good tut on modeling. There are two windows, the console window and the UI window. resize the UI window so you can see the console window. view->Background Image. You see the panel, eh? Don’t load yet…load the image in the UV/Image Editor using Image->Open INSTEAD. crash?
Then, in the background image, just select the image using the up-down selector (because it will already be in memory). Keep an eye on that console window for ANY message.
You aren’t using a Radeon ATI graphics card, are you? I’m thinking an OpenGL driver issue.
Bah. Tried via the UV/image editor and same thing, I had the console in full view but the crash is so instant that nothing has time to display. I’m wondering why there is no output file for the console.
I am using a Radeon, is there no hope?
Edit: You know what, I’m stupid. Just dropped in a completely random picture and it works fine. Maybe it just didn’t like that a .gif was resaved as a jpeg.
Well, reformated images (gif to jpg) should be okay. re-named file extensions is a big no-no. Most applications look at the extension to recognize what decoder to use, and if the jpg decoder gets a gif-encoded image, “unpredictable results may occur”. You can use Blender to re-format and convert a gif image to a jpeg, or GIMP, but it has to be converted, not just renamed. If you have Quicktime installed, you can read in a GIF image via the Input Image node or VSE, and set your output format to JPG and save it. Then you can load the JPG as a background. Of course, if you have QT, you should also be able to load the GIF as the background, so long as it is named whatever.gif
Glad you didn’t have to go thru the whole Radeon driver thing, although many have been successful at it and report better performance.
I have had issues in the past using GIMP to save as a different format. It is very intermittent. I find it best to save as GIMP file first, .xcf, then save as jpg, tga or whatever.