When i have been looking at tutorials on the web i have found people putting pictures in the background to help them with scale and modeling but they never tell you how. Can someone please help me put a picture in the background of the modeler.
here is an example of what i mean at this site:
http://kotinetti.suomi.net/fsware/hippie/tutorial1/index.php
Hello
it’s hard to be a noob?! 
In the “View menu” ( in the 3D window header), choose “background image”!
Then, enable the “use” blue button, then the “Load” one, browse your HD to
choose the desired image, and it’s done?!
“Size” sizes the image…obviously
“Blend” sets the transparency"
“Offset” moves the image to match your model
Bye
Where is the use and load buttons?
I have circled the box and drawn arrows to “use” and “load”. Also, if you control-left click on the “load” button, then you can activate the image browser.
Hope that helped.
Attachments
My gameblender looks diferent to yours the buttens and things are moved / missing. is yours more up to date or something?
What platform are you running it on? I am using Windows XP.
Are you sure that you have hit View >> Background Image?
My advice: Do the preparatory work with Gimp. First give the pictures a big margin area around, so you have room for working. Always make the reference images square and same sized, so you dont need to scale them in Blender and it is easy to rotate them. In Gimp use guides to locate the center point of each image exactly. (There is a menu where you can tell Gimp to take same sized squared selections, then copy the areas and paste as new image, and save with names “-top”, “-front”, “-right”. Remember to save in JPG or PNG -format)
Use some easy-to-locate points for center point, eg the center of tire in cars for horizontal guide. Or, it seems, in Gimp you can border your image with bounding-box outline guides, if the center point is not clear, but the bounding-box is.
When you prepare Blender, in tiled workspace it would be intuitive if you locate the top-view at north-west, front-view at south-west and side-view at south-east window, so they correspond to your keyboard shortcut NUM-7, NUM-1, NUM-3 locations at numpad. Backround images seems to be visible only in Ortho-viewmode.
I am running it on xp but my one still looks different to yours. my layer buttons are at the start then it goes the view buttons in which there is more of and i had more on the lower box. when i got my one it said it was just game blender what did yours say, just there may be different types.
You could use background images, but it could be a lot more sophisticated. Take a look at what’s being done with Max in this video:
I think it’s even possible to take it a step beyond that. For example you could have selected vertices mapped back to x,y and z planes with images on them so you would be able to see exactly where the vertices lie in these planes. That would allow you to edit with your view pointing in any arbitrary direction.
I found the problem i had 2.2 and i have just got 2.45 thxs for the help.
Before you go ahead, you’d better download the new 2.46!!! Lots improvements and tools!!