Hello!
I’m new to Blender, looking for simplicity. I’m trying to get nice, flat images of 3D models.
Is it possible to get this without fiddling with camera perspective? If not, is there a quick way to get the camera positioned to give a perfectly flat “overhead” image of a plane?
How about an x-pixel by y-pixel area of a scene?
TIA
Hey and welcome to Blender, I am assuming by “flat” you want an image that has no depth to it (like the orthographic view). If i’m assuming right then you can make the camera render things from and orthographic perspective (ie. flat)… select the camera then go to the edit buttons (F9) then you should see a large square button at the bottom of the edit buttons that says “ortho” if you click this then the camera will view things from and otho perspective which should give the effect you want. I hope this was what you meant and that it helps. Good luck!
that’s good tip, but not quite what I’m after. What I’m trying to accomplish is to capture images of 3D models or scenes to use as skins, for example.
I’m struggling with getting the scale and angles correct in the saved images.
Example. I create a sphere, color, extrude, squash, slice, etc. until I have the look I’m after for say a 3d-looking button on an application. I’m trying to capture the lighting (the 3D effect), but I need the view to be exactly straight on so the button is perfectly round. I also need to deal with scaling so that I can get reasonable results during post-prod scaling with The GIMP.
Is this making sense?
erm… im a tad confused lol, dw its prob me ive been at college all day and im a :-?
erm yeah, if you want something to be straight on then surely if you just place it on a right angle and then place the camera at a right angle to it so its like directly facing it, then position the camera whilst looking through the camera viewpoint then you can get it to a specific distance away form the object so that the “scale” of the shot is what you are after if that makes sense, sorry im giving you what you dont want here but from what i can gather you want to use blender to create an image of a button that you can use in say an application or maybe a web-page or something… am i right? erm i would say that if you want a striaght on view then if yuo move the camera to simply be directly in front of the object… as for scaling and post-prod, if you make the world colour one solid colour when yuo render it you can open the image in GIMP then you can just use magic wand (i assume GIMP has magic wand, i use photoshop) and then select the colour and invert your selection and crop so you are only left with the shape that reaches the boundaries of the image… if you mean “scaling” as in the actual size of the rendered image then you can adjust that in the renderbuttons window on the far right there is a panel for output sizes etc, there are presets but you can click in the box and change them. hope this helps again sorry if its not what u want, if im wrong can u possibly describe to me exactly what your project is then perhaps i can be more presice lol
Thanks for the reply. You’ve confirmed that my approach is correct. It feels awefully “fiddly” though.
Perhaps will practice I’ll get the process repeatable.
K, no worries, it is quite fiddly yes but you can reduce this slightly by using the transform proerties, (N key) i dont know if you knew about those already, sorry if u did lol but u sed u were new to blender, erm yeah if you select any object (camera as well) and press N then you get a dialogue box with all the transform properties such and rotate xyz and position xyz so this allows you to input exact co-oridinates etc which makes it a bit easier, but you are right, Ive found that with most things in blender there often isnt a simple and easy way you just have to keep at it untill you can do it in your sleep lol.
Oh well, good luck and happy blending dude!
If you don’t like ortho you can try close to ortho by moving the camera back and adjusting the camera lense to a higher figure.
He may be after the preset views in blender (numpad 1,3,7)
Numpad 1 gives FRONT View
Numpad 7 gives TOP view
Numpad 3 gives SIDE view
Make sure numlock is on though.
Thanks, I’ll give that a try
I think there also was a hotkey for setting the view direction of a window to the normal of a selected face.
If you want the camera look straight down on your button you just have to select a face on the top side of the button, hit this hotkey and add a camera. This camera should look in the direction you wanted.
The only problem is that I forgot the hotkey. 
Does anyone else remember?
Shft-V
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You can skip that part - just enable rendering with RGBA channels in the render panel, and render to PNG, or TGA (not sure if it wasnt TIFF or some other format :P). If you open the rendered picture in PS, you have the transparencies mapped, so you dont need to use magic wand etc.