Construct a Car Using Modeling and Shading - Blender 2.5 - page 106

3. Now locate and enable the Background Images panel. Click on the Add Image
buton and then click on the triangle poining to the right-hand side that appears
in the rectangle represening these speciic background image seings.
4. On the Axis drop-down menu, select Top and click on the buton below that has
the Open label.
5. Select the image vw-golf-5-prepared.png from the hard disk. Just after
selecing the image, only the top view must show the background image. Now it's
ime to move it to get the Y axis passing along the line of symmetry of the drawing.
To do that, modify the X parameter for this background image, unil it gets correctly
posiioned.
6. To s e t u p t h e b a c k g for u n d i m a g e fo r t h e f for n t v i e w, w e m u s t fo l l To w t h e s a m e s t e p s ,
except that we just need to pick the image already loaded (buton on the let-hand
side of the Open buton) and choose Front in the Axis drop-down menu. This image
also requires changing the X value to get it symmetrically aligned, this ime with
respect to the Z axis (blue line in the 3D View). A good way to check that things are
being set up correctly is to pan the front view upwards and the top view downwards,
and check if the background images are aligning correctly.
The last background image must be set for the right view, using the same image and
posiioning it as needed for the three images to be aligned simultaneously . This last
part of simultaneous alignment of the three images may sound weird, so let's just use a
simple method to get it done: After making sure that the top and front views have their
backgrounds aligned verically, we need to locate a point that is easily ideniiable in the
three views of the car. Click on the top view and then the front view unil the 3D Cursor
gets correctly located on both the background images. Once that's done, it's just a mater
of adjusing the X and Y ofsets for the background image in the right view to get the image
located in such a way that the 3D Cursor is marking the exact same point in the three views.
Here's a helpful trick to get the images aligned fast: The seings for the top and
front images should have the same (or very close) X value, and the seings for
the front and right images should have the same (or very close) Y value.
Yeah, quite a bit of iddling to just get a few images posiioned correctly, but without this
step it is not possible to make real use of the background images for copying the shape into
3D. Remember that in the modeling tasks we will be working almost all the ime using the
quad view mode and that all the geometry we are going to create will be part of the same
object, so we must be in Edit Mode when adding a new geometry. Saving an incremental
version of the file now would be a good idea.