Hey guys it's Aaron, I want to look at something
today that I think I do a lot of during live models and some of my other modeling videos,
but I maybe haven't touched on in a while. How, why, what it is I'm doing, and that is, I just
wanted to do a quick refresher on working with reference imagery. So the idea here is I'm not
going to go into photo match, this isn't matching photos, this is not using the depth, setting
the axis on a photo to match it in 3d space, this is more about just having an image that
I want to use as a reference. So there's a couple ways I'm gonna talk about loading that
in, we'll take a look at those right now. Okay, so, in a recent live video we modeled a
boat and I had some reference images, so one of the options you can do with reference images of
course it's simple is, if you have the setup to do it is open SketchUp and then also open these other
images. So, if I was to do something like this, obviously this doesn't work great in my setup.
I'm modeling just on my laptop screen here so losing half my screen to an image and a plan
is not ideal. This works real well of course if you have multiple monitors which it
seems like a lot of people do nowadays, I could actually have this open over on
the other monitor maybe blown up real big and this next to it, where I could just
kind of turn my head and look at the images that sort of thing, that works really well.
But, if I'm in a situation like I currently am, losing half my screen to reference images is not
really an option. So, now I have to look at some different ways to import those reference images
to use them. So, you can see there I actually have two different types of images, one is actually
a picture of the boat I'm trying to model, the other is a set of plans. So, how I would
want to import these, would be different based on the type of image, so let's look at two
different ways I would import these reference images. The first one is pretty straightforward.
I'm going to go to file. I'm going to say import and I'm going to grab that plan, and I'm going
to import it as an image. I'm going to go ahead and import it and I'm just going to slap it on the
ground and I'm going to blow it up nice and big, so I can reference it. So, right now as
I look at it I'm looking down from above and this is pretty much how I would import
this. So, this is gonna let me come in here and you know trace details off of this to
use one note might be to take a look at this and possibly scale or possibly straighten.
So, what do I mean by straightening? Let's talk about that. So, right here I have a line
going right down the middle, you can see that down the middle of the boat, if I come to one end
and I click on it and then I come along the other end, so my red axis should be straight down the
middle, but you can see it's just slightly off, and if I look back here you can see it actually
starts off on the center line and then by the time it gets to the length of the boat it's off
a little bit. So, what I would do in this case is, I would draw a line on that center line
because it's easier to have a line to snap to, I'm going to do a group select to select
both the image and the centerline, then I'm going to go to rotate, click at one end, and click at the other end, now I'm going to drag
that end down until it snaps onto the red axis, that way as I come in here I draw a line like
this, look at that now, it's perfectly straight, perfectly aligned so any lines that are supposed
to align to straight now, I'm actually be able to snap straight along there. The second idea is to
scale it, so if I have a known quantity, if I know how long this boat is from this point to this
point, what I can do is, I can draw that line, I can grab my tape measure and click one end to
the other end, and then type in the length it's supposed to be. So, this is a 42-foot ship, I can
type 42 foot, enter, do you want to scale, yes, and now this is to scale, so that is a good tool
to have, that's a good way to get that image in. If I was tracing shapes off of here that
I want to use, that would be the way to do it. My reference image, on the other hand,
remember this picture I have right here, this reference image, I don't know that I would
want to pull it in and throw it on the ground, this is good because I can trace actual geometry
off of this plan with a reference image like that, I more want to see the details and then hop in
and try to copy or replicate them in my model, so the way that I would import that would probably
be different. What I would go about doing with the solution that I've come up with lately
especially, is to go into my styles, click edit on my current style, and then click
this fourth tab right here which is my watermark, and load that image in as a watermark. So,
I'll go ahead and grab that image hit open and it's going to start by plopping it right in
the middle like this, I can overlay it, an overlay is going to be if I wanted to like show up in
front of my model which I don't really want I want to be in the background, so I click on background
that puts my image in the back. It's huge... this is like wallpaper on your computer huge, so I'm
going to click next here, I can fade it out a little if I want to, I'd find that I'd start to
lose detail if I faded out so I generally leave it complete on an image, and then what I'll do is
hit position, rather than tiling or stretching and then I'll stick it in the corner, so stick in the
top left or lower right corner, and I'll scale it so it's small, it gets small enough that I can
still see the detail I want to get out of it, but it's not going to like crowd me, you know?
So I'm going to crowd my modeling screen, what that lets me do because I put it in the
background it means if I work on something big, it's not going to get in my way, but if I want
to come out like this I don't need another screen to glance up and see this picture, it's kind
of like I printed the picture out and just set it here on my screen, and I don't lose any real
estate by putting in the back to have it there. So, there we go there's a couple ways you can get
reference imagery into SketchUp on a single screen using import image and watermark. Like I said,
that was something that I just kept doing over and over on our live models and I think I did it
in a couple of skill builder videos and I'm like I don't know that I've actually touched on what,
why, when I do those things. So, it does depend on the piece you have if you're working off of
a scaled piece of content something like a plan, “like a plan”, then you may want to import it and
scale it and have it on the ground to reference. If it's just something you want to glance up
occasionally, having a second monitor is great, I mean I'm not saying don't take advantage,
I have a second monitor over there and if I'm modeling something and I want to see the image,
I put it over there on the second monitor, but if I'm traveling if I'm away from my second monitor
or something like that, you can use a watermark to pull that image in and still reference it
without actually eating up your modeling space. If you like that video if so click like down
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