How should one put and align reference images of vehicle or aircraft in blender so that they form 3 view image showing side,front and top of reference image?
Background images don’t work well for blueprint setups since you can never fully align the images correctly and they don’t function in perspective views. The better method is to create and empty, go to the empty’s settings and apply an image to it. This way you can scale and correct the image using Blender’s tool-set rather than the background alignment functions.
To prevent you from accidental selecting the empty while modelling, just deselect it in the tree-view…
https://www.blender.org/manual/de/modeling/empties.html
“Empties can display images. This can be used to create reference images, including blueprints or character sheets to model from, instead of using background images. The image is displayed regardless of the 3D display mode.”
wait what? yes blueprints work great with background, as long as it does not have any perspective…
and “does not work in orthographic view”, well that is the ONLY time it works… so that is wrong
also, you dont use an empty, there is spesificly a tool to add images into the blender 3d scene.
I made a typo, I meant perspective view. The background is fine for quick reference but to accurately align images for multiple views it isn’t well suited. You can enable the ‘Import images as planes’ function in Blender but this imports and applies the image to a textured plane and thus you cannot see the image while modelling in the wireframe or solid modes.
Applying an image to an empty enables you to create a cross-section blueprint layout which works in all views and editing modes. It’s very similar to how people setup blueprints in 3DSMax.
But I differ in opinion, I’ve had much better luck working accurately with empties. Each to their own.
Can u post an example for beginners?