Configuring the viewport background with a bitmap

- In this video, we're going to place an image in the view port so that we can trace over it later. To begin with, we need to create a target camera. So, click on the camera's category here on the create tab and then click target. Drag a camera out on the grid from one position to another and you'll see that you've created two different nodes here, the camera itself, and its target. They'll always be connected. So, let me go ahead and move the target. You can see that the camera will automatically point at it.

Let's move that to the origin point by right-clicking on the x spinner and right-clicking on the y spinner down here in the transform type-in's. Then select the camera node. Give it a value in Z of six feet to move it up above the ground plane and then right-click on the x and y spinners so that the camera is looking straight down at the grid. Now, press C to look through the camera and you can see up here, it says camera one now 'cause that's what we're looking through.

So, we're looking straight at the grid. Great, now let's go ahead and click on the shaded menu here and select view port background, Configure view port background. The shortcut is Alt+B, by the way. Now, select the use files radio button and click the files button. Navigate to the exercise files folder and select the Potterytif bitmap image. Open, apply to active view, and OK.

So, we see the image, although it looks distorted. The reason it is stretched is because we neglected to change one of the settings in here. Let's go back. And configure the view port background again. And choose to change the Aspect Ratio to match the bitmap. OK. So now, it's coming in with the correct aspect ratio, but we're zoomed in too far. So, you can try moving the camera backwards, but that's only gonna change the relationship of the camera to the grid.

What we need to do here is click and hold on the hand symbol and select this option. This will allow us to enter 2D pan zoom mode. In this mode, you can pan and zoom with the mouse wheel and it will affect the view port background. When you use the dolly camera tool, it also affects the view port background, so that you can use this tool to kinda fine tune the zoom level.

Basically, you just wanna see the whole image on the screen and in the next video, we'll trace over the profile of this piece of pottery here so that we can replicate a three-dimensional object.