View Single Post
Old 24th February 2011, 01:17 PM   #2
Stiglr
Senior Member
Professional user
 
Stiglr's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 604
Default Re: Move Background Images

This makes total sense.... and good news! What you want is possible!!!

Of course, it does beg the discussion that, your background views can only be as good as your source graphics... if the graphics aren't accurate from one view to the next, you can't expect them to serve as a perfect guide. If you are lucky enough to have blueprints or highly accurate drawings, it's a simple matter of cropping the graphics exactly and maintaining the same pixel length for X, Y and Z axes.

However, if like most graphics, there's a little "slop" here and there... you'll have to ascertain which view is most helpful to edit in at any one time, and adjust the graphic (both size and position) to give you the most accurate viewpoint.

Here's a video tutorial on this, for aircraft, but the concepts should suit any object.

One thing I find very helpful at the outset is to determine the size of the object itself, and make a 99% transparent bounding box, which I can display or hide at any time. I use this bounding box to serve as a "boundary" for initial sizing and placement of my background images. Unless your graphics are WAY OFF, they should fit snugly inside your bounding box (use wireframe view to see just a key line for the box). Holding Shift + Alt and the arrow keys will size the background image proportionally.

Then, after placement of your images, you'll find it necessary to sometimes shift them a smidge to give you a more correct guide to model from. For this, you use the [b]Alt + up/down or left/right arrow keys to nudge the graphics in whatever direction you need.
__________________
Flight Sim Project Contributor

My Gaming Rig:
i5 2500K Quad-Core CPU at 3.3GHz
MSI P67A-C43 mobo
4GB of PC12800 DDR3 memory
Windows 7
1GB Galaxy GeForce GTX550 Ti video card GeForce 270.61 drivers (4/2011)
Cougar joystick/throttle combo
CH Pedals

Last edited by Stiglr; 24th February 2011 at 01:20 PM.
Stiglr is offline   Reply With Quote