Complete Newbie

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I am familiar with The Gimp and have installed it along with many plug-ins and it operates fine. I wanted to experiment with blender and installed 2.49 this morning using the windows intstaller. I also installed python 2.6.

I get the message “Checking for installed Python…got it” in the black box.

I have tried all day to open or import a jpg file with no luck.

I get error messages, “unknown file type or error, check console” and, “file is not a blender file” when trying to open the file and “invalid or empty file” when trying to import the file.

I was under the impression that I would not need additional scripts for jpg files in blender and have not downloaded any scripts today.

I suspect that I may still have some tweeking to do to the installation.

I am not familiar with any progaming languages and just barely get along on the computer most of the time, finding what I need on the various forums.

Any help or guidance would be appreciated.

#2

Hi,

There are different ways of opening images, depending on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to apply it as a texture to an object, view it as an image, load it as a background to trace over, etc?

#3

I was basically just trying to open any graphic or photo file in the program to test the install. I would like to view an image and eventually load it as a background to trace over.

#4

If you want to place it in the background of the viewport.
In the header, theirs a menu called view, click it, go to background image.
You can press load in the popup that appears.
The other settings scale it, move it along the x/y axis and change opacity.
Play around with it.
Hope i explained well enough, good luck.

#5

Thanks cire 792 and rawpigeon for your reply. I tried the load as a background image and that worked fine. Playing around with the settings now.

Also looking at the animations tutorials to see if any of the gif animations I made in gimp are of any use in blender. Have some that I would love to do in 3d.

Thanks again for your help

#6

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/Types/Image

Scroll down to the image http://wiki.blender.org/uploads/b/b0/Manual-PartIV-ImagePanel.png

And it says some stuff about what you want to do. As far as doing gifs - I’m not 100% if it auto-refreshes them but I’m guessing for now that it does.

#7

Thanks nicktechyguy. Took me a while but I finally found the image box under textures. I think it will work for what I have in mind.