Transcript:
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Derek Elliot from dirt comm. And today I’ve got a relatively quick tutorial for you where we are going to be talking about how to use background images in blender, 2.8 which is a little bit different than it is in 2.79 couple. My older tutorials people were asking how to use background images and while. I’m always happy to explain in the comments. I think it’s a little easier to just go ahead and make a video so here we are. So this is the default blender setup. Your file should look just like this. I’m doing that so that it’s easy for people who you know haven’t been crazy stuff for their interface, but yeah, so let’s just delete this cube and to add a background image, we just need to press shift a to add an object like we would any other object and then add image and make that a background image. Now what you need to do from here is just navigate to your image wherever you have, it saved. This is gonna be the hardest part of this tutorial for some people with unorganized folders such as myself so yeah. I’ve got a couple images here. You can press this little button to see what the images are. It’s just a couple views of a car. I found online. I cut them out for the purposes of this and tried to kind of align them, but use whatever you like whether it’s a logo for an animation or or if you’re also modeling a car or something like that and do what you want to do, so let’s go ahead and add this front image, so I’m just gonna double Click that, and now it will add it right there in middle of my scene, but it is at the angle. I was looking at, which is a little bit of a funky angle, so I don’t want to thank that. So what I’m gonna do is press Alt R and that’s gonna reset the rotation and then now after press N to bring up my side window. I’m sorry, my side toolbar over here. I can adjust this rotation, so let’s just rotate this on the X Axis by 90 degrees. I’m holding ctrl to snap to those 10 degree increments now. I want to bring it so that the wheels are sitting right on the plane here, so I’m gonna press G and Z and then just drag it right up to the edge there, and yeah, I mean, so that’s the basics of it. Now what, I’m going to just walk through some of the other kind of things that are happening here, so you’ve got the image there when we look at it from the front, it’s great, but when we turn around, it’s not there, so that may be something that you want or don’t want in this case since I have the back view of the car, that’s fine, so if I did want to see it from the other side, I could just go down here into the settings and then change the the view side to both, and now I’ll see it both directions, which is helpful in some cases. But in this case like I said, I have the back, so I’m just going to change that to front only and now to add the back image What I’ll do is Ill press. I’m just gonna so they don’t have to do the rotation thing. I’m just gonna press one to go into my front Orthographic view. And then I’m going to press shift a at an image again and let’s make another background image, select the back and then because these images were the same size that they coming in pretty evenly, so just dragging that up like that. Now they are kind of on top of each other, So I’m just gonna present. Gy, move that one back and you’ll notice that we can’t see. It just took me a second to figure out at first, but it’s actually because when we added just like the first image was added at weird angle, it came in at that angle. This one, we added in an orthographic view, so the display perspective option is off If we check that on, though we’ll see that now we can see it now for this one. We’re getting the same effect, but I want to actually see this from the back only so I can enable that option and now this is working a little more like we would want a couple other things to look at here transparency. If you wanted to, for instance, be able to see the image behind your model, but you still want to see your model and just kind of want to dimmed a little more. You can click use Alpha, and then what that can do is allow you to adjust the transparency so that this is just kind of, you know, it’s working as a reference image, it’s not so much. I’m sorry a background image as defined by blender, which, by the way the only difference between this reference and background option is just automatically, like enables a couple things. I think when you do a reference image, both of these check boxes are checked and it works for. You know, it has all these enabled now. This is depth. I think this is. Oh, yeah, so this would be like, so for an example. We can see our grid in front of everything here because it’s basically like we’re doing this last sort of that’s what this depth is. If it’s in front, that means it’ll be in front of any objects. So if we were at to add our cube back, you can see that no matter what way we look that’s always in front, but if we were to turn this on to default, then yeah, it just works like it normally would. Now let’s see if we turn it back. Then that means it’s okay, so then it’s like always behind objects. Yeah, so that’s what the back option is doing, so let’s get rid of that cube and then lets press Alt R And then we can also press Alt + G to bring that back to center now. Let’s rotate it on the X axis by 90 degrees, rotate on the Z axis by 90 degrees. And so it’s kind of oriented correctly and now. I’m gonna do the same thing. Let’s just press the GZ. Move this right up to the edge, so the wheels are sitting on the plane right there, and now I want to scale this up so that it kind of aligns with these other views. So if I press s to scale it, you can see that we’ve kind of lost what we’re doing with aligning the wheels and stuff on that plane, so what I can do is press period on my keyboard and change the pivot point to the 3d cursor, which now means it’ll pivot from this this cursor. That’s right at my origin and also aligned essentially with the wheel. So if I press s now to scale it, it’s gonna go from that 3d cursor, which is perfect and by the way that pivot point has applications in many places in blender, You’ll find that very handy to kind of manipulate with that cursor so great, that’s in there now this is set up pretty good now because I did add this As a reference image instead of a background, it automatically had it to display on both sides, which with the front and back views. I didn’t want that, but with this, you know, Cars in most cases are pretty symmetrical on both sides, So I’m just gonna leave it on the both option and we can also use the Alpha to, you know, make this a little more transparent now. The reason it’s kind of got this cutout look is because the file. I use is actually a PNG and it is erased, like that’s a transparent If you just had a regular JPEG image, it wouldn’t like automatically cut it out or anything, so that’s just depending on what kind of image you import in there. Now, just a couple other things I want to talk about. These are not like objects. They’re they’re empties. So if we look over here, we can see that they’ve been named empty because that’s what they are and now one thing when you’re modeling, you may not want to, you know, accidentally, like select. Those so what you can do is over here in this scene, you know, outliner you can change the filter restriction tiles and and turn this one on that allows you to control what objects are selectable, so these are selectable now, but if I were to go in here and just turn that off on all them, then you can see, we can still select objects like our camera and our lamp there, but we cannot select these empties, which is perfect in case of something like a background image Because I just wanted to stay right there as a reference for when I work, which the more the more I keep saying. I don’t know why they really have reference and background. I guess it’s it’s kind of convenient, but it seems a little more confusing, but anyways, if we go into our camera view and we can see that these are in view. If I were to press f12 to render this, it’s not going to. There’s nothing there like it. You’d think that it would be rendering because it’s in the camera view, but it’s not and again, that’s it because these are just empties, so if you wanted to actually see an imported image in a render like if you were going to try to hang a picture on a wall or something like that, then you would actually have to enable an add-on. There’s a number of ways you can do it like anything in blender, but I’m just going to go up here into my preferences, and this Pat on comes with blender, so it’s it’s really not a big deal to Jen able. I’m just a search for image, and then it’s this one right here. Import images as planes. So check that box, close your preferences, and now what I can do is press shift a add an image and you’ll see I have this third option. Now, images as planes and then let’s just select. Let’s just select one of these as view front, and now we can’t see it because we’re just in our regular viewport, but if we were to switch over here and turn on like texture, for example, we can see that this object actually has a material automatically applied to it, which is great. So now if we were to go into our render view and press f12 to render it, let’s actually change this to cycles. You can see that the object is now rendering properly, and if we were to go in our render view in here, we can see that, you know, this is getting light information, just like any other object would, which is great? You know if you want to add like. I said a picture on a wall or any any case, where you just want to import an image. It’ll automatically come in with the proper aspect ratio and everything it’s a. It’s really pretty convenient to use that hat on in in various cases, so let’s go back to our regular view. That’s pretty much everything. I wanted to show you. Yeah, you know, it’s really easy to to work with these background images. I definitely think that this new system is a good upgrade. It’s a little weird getting used to, but I do think it’s an improvement on the old system in 2.79 If there’s anything else, I didn’t cover here or you guys had any questions about something relating to this feel free to let me know, and I’d be happy to answer more questions in the comments, and of course, if you have suggestions for future tutorials, anything you’d like to see. Please leave in comment about that as well. I’m always looking for new ideas. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. If you did, please give me a thumbs up. Subscribe at the channel. If you want to see more tutorials. And I’ll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching.