In this lesson video, we are going to discuss how to place images as background or reference in the 3d viewport. Often when doing modeling or any other tasks in renderer, you need to bring in an image or a picture to the viewport to be used as reference. Since Blender 2.8. It is much easier to do this because we can use a new type of empty object called the image object. This object can provide almost everything that we need in terms of having image reference in a 3d viewport. This video will be divided into three sections.
First, we'll discuss several methods of creating image objects. Second, we will dive in to discuss each of the features provided by the image objects. And finally, in the third section, we will discuss how to add image backgrounds to the camera view. We need to discuss this separately because for camera objects, the method is different As we don't use the image object to create an image object in blender, you can do this in two different ways. First is by dragging an image onto the 3d viewport. For example, I can open the file browser like this, pick an image, and then just drag it like so to the blender 3d viewport.
When you release the mouse Blender automatically creates this image object from the image file. The image object will be positioned and oriented based on our viewing angle. So if you want the image to be aligned to the right view, for example, make sure that you are viewing the right viewport first, before reading in the image. The second method of creating an image object is by using the Add object command. You can go to the Add menu up here, or simply by pressing Shift a. There are actually three locations in the object name You were you can create an image object, you can see the image category here.
In its sub menu, we can find two options, reference and background. Both of these options will actually create the same image object type. The only difference is the settings that they will have when created. But don't worry, these settings are not set in stone, you can always change the settings later. So you can convert Reference Type to background type, or vice versa background to reference later without any problem. If you click reference here, for example, Blender will ask you to select the image file you want to use.
Just select any image you have on your computer, and then press load reference image button here. Just like before, we have an image object aligned to the current view. Let me hide this for now. The third place where you can create an image object is inside the empty car. category here, and then choose image down here. Let's click this.
As you can see, the last method is a bit different. Because Blender didn't ask for any image, it only creates this rectangle, which is actually an empty image object. Again, all of these different methods we discussed here will basically create the same image object type. If we select this empty image object, and then open the properties editor, you can see now the data Properties panel shows this empty object icon. So yes, the image object is actually just a subset of the empty objects in the display as menu, you can actually convert it to other types of empty objects, such as plane access, or arrows, etc. But if you set this to image, you will be able to access these parameters and also pick the image you want to use using the sexual Just click open here, and then browse for the image.
Now we can see the image in the viewport. Also notice how the data panel icon has changed to this image I can. Besides a single image, you can also bring in a sequence of images or movie files, etc. This can be quite useful for doing rotoscoping for example, now, because the image object is just an object, you can do transformation on it, such as moving it around, or rotated or scale it would I wouldn't recommend you to scale it as that can distort the image ratio and also will break the measurement or the size of the value of the object. What you should do instead is using this size parameter here. If you change the size to five meters, for example, the five meters value is actually used to define the longest Part of the image source either be the width or the height, so whichever is the longest will have five meters value.
What's so great about image objects is the handles. Without typing the size value manually, you can change the size of easily by dragging any of the four corners. Or you can also direct the border lines like this. As you may already notice, it always respects the original image size ratio, you never have to worry about accidentally stretch or squash the image, which is another great feature of the image object. But there is a small caveat here. After you drag the corners or the borders.
Sometimes you need to click on the image object to force the size value here to be updated. I don't think this is a bug. It just needs time to update the value. Now one thing you need to be aware of when reading these corners is that you may offset the image farther from its origin location. If you see this orange dot here, this is the origin of the image object to move the whole image relative to its origin, you can use this offset values x to move it horizontally and why to move it vertically. If you want the origin to be at the center, you can just hover your mouse on top of these input fields, and then press backspace inlander.
Pressing backspace will reset any input fields to the default values. In the case of our image offset values, the defaults are minus 0.5, not zero. If you input zero, this will actually put the origin at the bottom left corner, not at the center. Next, we can control the transparency of the image object by first activating this use alpha option here and then just change this transparency value here. I find this transparency feature very helpful to make the image less distracting when doing modeling. Now we are going to discuss the core parameters of the image object.
The depth value is for controlling the depth sorting. To see these options in action. Let's create a cube, put it below or behind the image and then duplicate it and put the new one in front of the image object. Okay. Now if we are looking at the image from this angle, the default option here will make the image looks like any ordinary to the object in blender, it will block what is behind it and be blocked by what is in front of it. But if you set this to front, the image object now always rendered after the other 3d objects, so it is always in front of the other objects.
If we set this to back, the opposite will happen. It always rendered before the other 3d objects so it looks like it is behind the other objects. Again, this option will not change The image object position the only affects the depth sorting or the order of how it is rendered in the viewport. The next setting is the side setting. Both here means you will be able to see the image from the front side of it and also from the back side of it. If you set this to front, we can only see the image from the front side.
If you try to view the object from the backside, it will look invisible. The last one is back which basically the opposite of the front option, it is now invisible from the phone side, but visible from the backside. Next is the display orthographic here, if this is off, and you have the viewport in the orthographic mode, the image object will become invisible. So this way you can only see it when in the perspective mode. Next is the display perspective. This is the reverse of the previous option.
If you have This off, then you can only see the image when in orthographic mode. In perspective mode, the image will be invisible. The last option here is the display only axis aligned. If you have this option turned on, you can only see the image if you are in the axis of viewpoints. What axes viewpoints mean are the straight viewpoints such as from top, left, right, etc. If you are in a user view mode, the image will become invisible.
This is useful if you have multiple image references. For example, one image for the front view, one for the side view and another one for the top view. Placing image objects to be used in axis views is relatively easy. Because they are just objects you can just rotate them for 90 degrees to be perpendicular to any axis that one for example, if I want this image object to be only viewable in the front View, just press R to rotate and an x and then type 90, then enter and just turn on this display only axis aligned option. Now the image only visible when we are in the front viewport. If you rotate to other view angle, it becomes invisible.
Okay, but what if you want to place the image in a camera view? How can we do that? Well for the scenario, camera objects actually have their own background image, so it doesn't use the image object we have just discussed. To access it. First, you need to select a camera object. And then in a camera data tab.
Down here you can find a background image just section. To add an image background, you need to click this add Image button here. Click Open and just choose the image you want to use. For now, I will pick an image that has a portrait ratio on purpose. This is so we can discuss kotal adjust the image ratio later, we can see the settings are a bit different from the image object. To see the background image and how the settings affected, you need to be in the camera view mode.
So press zero on the numpad. This alpha value here is used for controlling the transparency of the image. The setting is for controlling the depth sorting, which basically has the same concept with the image object rep setting. Now this frame method here does not exist in the image object. In a camera object, you can have the image stretch to the camera view ratio. Of course, if your image doesn't have the same image ratio with the rendered output, some stretching will occurs.
If you set this to fit, the image will always be displayed fully in the camera view without any cropping. So you may see some of the areas become blind not covered by the image. The last one is crop. Basically this We will cover the entire camera view by allowing blender to crop the image if needed. The offset options is basically the same with the image object. The only difference is that it uses zero as the default numbers for centering the image.
And the photo settings down here should be self explanatory. This is for rotating the image. This one is for scaling the image. This is for flipping the image horizontally, and this one for flipping vertically. If you rotate the view to go back to the user perspective view, we can see the background image is not visible anymore because it will only be visible when we have the camera view active