Gathering references is a crucial part of 3D workflow. Whether working on a product, lighting, scene, or overall feel, references play an important part in deciding the flow and structure of the project
And so, I believe that gathering references should be
1- Fast
2- Intuitive
My daily driver for the reference gathering was Pureref, we all know it is a great piece of software that offers you an infinite canvas to gather and somewhat organize images and it is free, I used to go to websites and then drag and drop the images, resize and arrange them accordingly on my canvas
But, with time, I hit some limitations, The big ones being —
1 — Gathering images was slow, I had to drag and drop every image
2 — Not being able to collect videos
3 — The Organization was not robust, I had to manually do everything and it took a lot of time + effort
4 — I had to write down the address or website that I had gathered the image from in case I needed to go back to the source
My canvas for a keyboard rendering I had been working on
Separated references
The Search for an alternative
And thus began my search for a tool that eliminated some or all of these limitations
But if you google it, you will find out that there aren’t many options available in this space
I think it was in December 2022 that I saw eagle’s advert on youtube, the great thing?
Eagle offers you 30 days or trial period without any limitations, so It was sweet to try things out
Eagle is a new reference gathering tool that helps you in collecting, organizing, effectively and efficiently previewing almost everything you wish for.
Experience
The UI
As soon as you launch eagle, you are greeted by a window prompting you towards tutorials, which are a great way to know about it inside out, which is great for new users
The UI is clutter free and easy to understand and navigate
Gathering References
And here comes the part that I had been looking forwards to, Gathering references
The first thing you will notice is how simple and robust the reference gathering is with eagle, The browser extension lets you in on a number of ways to gather references quickly
My favrouite being
Alt + Right click, Just one click and it saves the image, No dragging and dropping to the overlay window again and againMy second favourite is Batch save the images on a webpage, It loads up all the images on the webpage in a seperate window and lets you select and save the ones you want
The great thing? It can collect Videos, Audio files, Fonts and even Url(s), Eliminating the need to keeping those 10+ tabs in the browser
It also saves the source link and title of every image gathered, making it easy to go back to when it is needed. +brownie points for that
Organization
Organizing references in eagle feels intuitive
Instead of creating separate files for each new project or topic, you can simply assign a directory and create as many folders as you like within the app
You can tag any reference in eagle making it easy to categorize and while you can batch select images and assign tags at once, my favourite method is Auto tagging. It allows you to quickly and easily assign tags to multiple items at once by simply dragging and dropping them into a folder
Smart folders are a great way to classify and find references. They allow you to mix and match various conditions, such as tags and colors, to quickly locate specific items. For example, you can use the ‘Keyboards’ tag and ‘Blue’ color conditions in a Smart folder to find all images with a blue background related to keyboards
There are many, many ways to organize your references but it’ll take a long time if I were to list them all, just try it out and find whatever suits you best!
Filtering
Filtering is so awesome that it needs it’s own section in this article.
You can search for those specific references using filters, and there are so many of them, You can filter by every attribute of the reference, Tag, Color, size, filetype and even the BPM of the sound (There are more of them but I usually use the Tag and Color filter)
Features I wish for
While eagle has made the process of collecting and organizing references a breeze, I still find myself going back to Pureref to make a canvas and overlay images over apps to use as references.
it would be great if Eagle had a similar feature to allow for easy overlay of references while working on a project.
Some limited form of addon support would also come in handy as it will give the community a chance to contribute to the app ( As in case with Obsidian)
Conclusion
Overall, Eagle is a feature-packed app that suits a wide range of users, providing a variety of tools for both simple and advanced tasks. Whether you are a hoarder who needs to store a large number of references or a meticulous organizer who needs to categorize and tag your references for easy access, Eagle has something for everyone to suit their own preferences and workflows.
Note : All the images in the screenshots have been collected from Pinterest and are properties of their respective owners
