This plugin fills in another gap in the Blender modelling experience. It
provides a means of setting up an unlimited amount of "background images",
or to be more precise "reference images". noThese planes can be
positioned/scaled/deformed to your liking and will seemingly appear behind
your transparently rendered geometry. In fact the reference planes are
transparent themselves and drawn on top of the geometry. This means it is
possible to use the planes for both sides of your geometry (front/back,
right/left, top/bottom), whatever way you look at them, they will always be
drawn transparently on top of the geometry, only appearing to be in a
certain 3 dimensional position.
Documentation
Go to User Preferences->Addons and enable the TranspRef addon in the 3D
View section. A TransRef pulldown will appear in the right pane (pull + icon
on right of 3D view). It will be empty until you select a standard
Mesh->Plane with four vertices. Then an Activate button will appear.
Click this and you will be left with a File Path Selector. Click the file
browser icon and load up an image, the image will be projected over the
scene contents, carefully filling the space bounded by the selected plane,
which you can afterwards translate, rotate, scale and deform(editmode) to
your wishes. When you select an image, also a Transparency slider will
appear, put it somewhere low so you can see your geometry behind the
reference planes.
IMPORTANT : due to the way TranspRef "fakes" 3D, this method does not
work well in Perspective Mode (deformations on images) so use Orthogonal
Mode with TranspRef!
NOTE: the reference planes shouldnt occlude object selection, thats why you
can only select them by clicking the plane edges.
NOTE: you can create as many reference planes as needed. Reselecting a plane
later, enables you to access image path and transparency values.
HINT: you can use the reference planes from both sides. I recommend to model
in orthogonal mode (which is a good idea anyhow) if you want this to work
correctly.
BEWARE: reference state will be saved along with your blend file
