How to make an object "see through"

cnitteberg

cnitteberg

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How to make an object "see through"

Is it possible to make an objekt "see through" or transparent, so that I can put a reference picture on a plane and then make a rough model with box-modelling and see thru the object I am creating?
 

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Frank, do you ever get tired of answering questions? You are incredible!:icon_thumbup: What would we do without you? And your illustrations are phenomenal! Please make a tutorial some day, I'm sure it would be a big hit!
 
Andreu said:
Frank, do you ever get tired of answering questions? You are incredible!:icon_thumbup: What would we do without you? And your illustrations are phenomenal! Please make a tutorial some day, I'm sure it would be a big hit!
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In all seriousness Frank should write the first Cheetah book. I'd buy it...
 
Thank you Frank!

I have to agree with Andreu, you are incredible. But yeah the biggest issue with C3D is acctually its documentation and lack of tutorials organized in a good way. So then it will be always be the same questions up again and again, and its not that easy to search either, because I often don´t know the right word for what I am searching for!

So again thanks for taking the time to answering all these newbie questions. And I will definitely do some tutorials when I get to know C3D better!

Maybe it would have been an idea for Martin to make a tutorial competition?

And there should definitely be a webpage with tutorials that are organized in a good way and not just a lot of forum threads that you have to go through that are not organized in any way!

I think C3D would benefit a lot from this!
 
There are a few things I don`t understand about how the blueprint works.
First of all what are the difference between scale(x,y,z) under blueprint and the height, width, length under properties? It seems to me that they do the same! How does the blueprint know what size and aspect ratio my image is, or to put it another way, how do I change how the image appear on the blueprint. I can change the size of the blueprint, but how do I transform the image?

In 3dsmax I just add a uvmap modifier on! But in 3dsmax the picture is a material!
 
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First of all what are the difference between scale(x,y,z) under blueprint and the height, width, length under properties?
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This question actually applies to all primitives, including the humble cube.

Each object in a 3d program has its own coordinate system (or "transform"). In essence it lives in its own world, with it's own origin (0,0,0), and its own scale and rotation. Scaling an object changes the scale value of its coordinate system and not the positions of points (belonging to the object) within its coordinate system. The easiest way to see this is to apply a non-uniform scale to an object, make it "editable", then (in points / edges / or faces mode) select all and rotate. You're rotating an object in "squashed" space. Every 3d program I know of works this way, although exacltly what you have to do in order to see this kind of thing happens varies from program to program because they use different terminology and UI conventions.

Now, you might ask why this is the case -- it's not the way the "real world" works. In "the real world" everything lives in a single coordinate system (er, well, kind of) there's no way of rotating an object's frame of reference independently of rotating the object -- objects don't come with their own pivot point. The answer is that it just seems to be the way to make the math easier.

Incidentally, 2d programs like Illustrator have, essentially, the same issue when you work with nested groups of objects.
 
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Thank you, I see the difference, not really sure if I understand what you can use it for but thanks anyway. Do you know anything about how the blueprint handles the images that is loaded into it. Because if I throw in a pic thats not rectangular, it gets squeezed! Yes i can scale it on one axis, but how do I know when it has the right aspectratio when I scale it? Or do I have to do this before I throw it in to blueprint?
 
cnitteberg said:
Because if I throw in a pic thats not rectangular, it gets squeezed! Yes i can scale it on one axis, but how do I know when it has the right aspectratio when I scale it?
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cnitteberg said:
How does the blueprint know what size and aspect ratio my image is, or to put it another way, how do I change how the image appear on the blueprint. I can change the size of the blueprint, but how do I transform the image?
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To start and make it simple, just keep the scale at 1 on all axes, culling = none. In the example below, the original image to be loaded is 509x210. I choose a 0.004 multiplying factor, hence the 0.840 and 2.036 X and Z properties. This is how you keep the aspect ratio. Keep in mind that the properties are for the blueprint object and not for individual images. Depending on your 6 sources images original size, you may have to do some cropping before loading them into the blueprint object.
Once you have all your images loaded, you may play with culling and rotate the camera to see what that does.
 

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Thank you Francois for keeping it simple. Thats what I needed to understand how it works! Thanks everybody for helping me understand it!
 
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