I am new to blender, and I have been having a problem arranging blueprints as backgrounds. I have cropped all the images as close as I can to the car, but they are all still different sizes. I am not sure whether the blueprints are fully accurate, or whether I am doing something wrong.
The link to the blueprint I am using is below
Could someone give me some guidance?
Could you post a picture of what yours looks like?
are you familiar with multiple 3d viewports yet?
This is as far as I have got so far. You can see on the picture that it doesn’t match up
No I have never heard of them. I am reading a book called “Beginning Blender- Lance Flavell” I am only on chapter 3
I am following the Dark scarab tutorial. I will take a look at smcars
yeah well multiple viewports is a good way to model with background images
you can create a plane (and/or scale it up to ONE of the background images) then adjust the background images in each of the other viewports by location and scale to the plane then start modeling from there…
I would collapse all those windows into one and use the number pad to view each perspective.
All these numbers are on the number pad not on the top of your keyboard.
(1) is front perspective
(3) is right perspective
(7) is top perspective
To view the opposite, back, left, bottom. press ctrl and 1,3,7.
Also hit number (5) on the pad to switch to user perspective and out of ortho.
As for the back round pics. From the look of the grids in each window it looks like each window is zoomed at a different level which would give an illusion of them being different. Place the default cube at the top of the roof in the front perspective and see if it is at the top of the roof in the left perspective.
Hello Matt W
You might want to check out the following as well for car making tutorials and tips:
An extensive Blender Cookie tutorial [started in version 2.49, finished in 2.5] can be found here :
Modeling a Porsche 911 GT3 RS - part 01
http://vimeo.com/7995299?ab
Blender 2.55 Beta Car Modeling Tutorial - Pontiac Firebird TA: 1 Blueprint Setup
There are 3 parts to this tutorial so far.
Also, here:
“Car Modelling in Blender 2.55 - Preparation”
a 5 part series.
Also, here:
Blender tutorial- Ich bau mir einen SLS Teil1
A 5 Part German Tutorial.
Having just seen BlenderNerds Tip about using LoopTool here :
“Filling in Faces Fast - Blender 2.5 Tutorial”
The Original Video by Crouch can be seen here:
“LoopTools for Blender”
I can only strongly advise you to have a peek and integrate LoopTool into your workflow - it will save you a huge amount of time creating mesh faces.
Good Luck
007Appleseed
If you need to move the pics click on the offsets.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]136956[/ATTACH]
You can left click and hold then slide left or right or click once or insert the blender unit number.
Thanks for all the responses guys. I think I have it now. Everything seems to match up. What do you guys think? Does it look ok?
set the viewport that is back ortho to camera view
zero on the numpad…
Thanks,
I am still having a problem. I will have to keep reading tutorials. I will let you guys know how I get on.
Hi Matt W.
The “multiple viewports” is what you have shown in your screenshot… it is simply that you have split the screen into different views showing the starting cube from front / side / top etc. These views can depend on what you manage to source from the reference blueprints. The ones you are working from of the VW car are actually pretty good, although the top view should have the car facing downwards (this is easy to alter in programs like Gimp or Photoshop).
Lining up the background images to a consistent size and position (so that all the views line up to the same cube) can be tricky at first but there is a knack to it. Even when I make my original images exactly the same scale, unless they are fully square, I usually find that one of them seems to change size when introduced as a background image, so you need to know how to remedy this.
My workflow for this problem is normally…
This way, I know all the sizes are a perfect match at the start. Better now than half way through modeling.
Another way, is that I make a single image for the background with all the blueprints on it at once. This is usually called “modelcar_full.png” or similar (I have included one in the attachment for you to get the idea). If you do this, then you only need to show the front view of the cube and add the modelcar_full.png background, then split this same window to make the other side and top views (with Numpad 7, Numpad 1 and Numpad 3 to change a view of a particular window… or you could use the window’s “view” menu… whew, hope I’m not going too fast there!)
Download this zip file and extract it to a folder (I made this for you, and you need to fully extract the file before opening the included blend files for the images inside to work). You will see two blender files and blueprint pictures. Each of the blender files has the blueprint backgrounds already lined up, and the starter cube ready to model with. mirrorcube_small.blend has the default starting size for the cube, whereas mirrorcube_fullsize.blend is a file where I have already resized the starting cube to fit the blueprints (just so you get the idea on how to make sure the blueprints are lined up, although you can start modeling from either file).
Note that I have already set up a “mirror modifier” on the cubes so that you only need to model one half of the car. This is explained in chapter 3, p.48-51.
Hope the above helps more than confuses. :spin: Be aware that other tutorials may be written for the older 2.49 blender and some of their instructions may be very different. Beginning Blender was written for 2.5 which is now the current version.
Attached files: http://www.filedropper.com/vwblueprints
Thanks for purchasing the book. 