PDF	Reference Images

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Part 1: Setting Up Blender

When you plan on modeling a car in Blender, or any 3D modeling program, you should find your self some good reference images. For any reference images or blueprints I highly recommend www.the-blueprints.com. This site allows users to create reference images on almost every kind of vehicle out there—even ones from Star Wars and Star Trek—so if you have a certain vehicle in mind, that is the site I suggest. I will try to keep this tutorial general enough to work for all cars and possibly any vehicle, so do not feel restricted to the car I choose here.

I have chosen to create the Chevy Camaro. If you would like to create this car with me you can download the reference images at the link I provided above. When choosing a blueprint try to chose one that has all the sides of equal size compared to each other and make sure that all of the images match up. I've seen some where parts of the car (like the mirrors) are missing in some views.

/*----------IMPORTANT----------*/ When you have gotten your reference images we must make sure that they are split up into four separate images (top, front, back, and side) and they all have the same relative size. When cropping your image you want the edges of the image right up against the edge of the vehicle in your reference image without cutting any of the vehicle's edges out. This makes it easier to make the reference images all the same size. If the images are not the same size at this point you will need to resize them so that they will be the same size when you put them in Blender. The width of all of the images should be the same EXCEPT for the side view. The side view's width should be the same as the height of the top view. You can see what the images should generally look like in the last image in this section. If you need help in getting your reference images up and in Blender correctly, please go check out my reference images tutorial. It goes over getting reference images set up much more in depth than I do here.

It is also good to take note of the ratio of the top view's height over its width. So if the width is 500 pixels and the height is 1000 pixels we have a 2/1 ratio. I will explain why we need this later on in the tutorial. /*--------------------------------------*/
Now that you have gotten your reference images we can set them up in Blender. First off split your Blender screen up into four viewing windows:

Now we need to set up the reference images in Blender. Usually we there are 5 sides to reference: Top, Bottom, Side, Front, and Back. To get our reference images into Blender we will use background images. To use background images all you have to do is go into "View-->Background Image" in each of the viewing windows. Then click on 'Use Background Image', 'Load', and find your reference images.

Just loading the images will not cut it though. The default size of all the images is 5. This is just fine except for that fact that the side view image will be much smaller than the other images. This is because the 'Size' of the background image is just the width of the image in Blender units. This is where our ratio comes into play. If you downloaded the reference images that I used then the ratio is 2112/913 pixels. Throw that in the calculator and I get 2.313. Take this number and multiply it by 5 (the default size of all of the background images). This gets me 11.566265. That is what the width or 'Size' that the side view needs to be. Assuming the images were made accurately you should be done with the background images.

Now we have Blender set up completely. In the next section we will begin modeling our car.

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