From the course: Blender: Vehicle Modeling

Setting up Blender for modeling - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender: Vehicle Modeling

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Setting up Blender for modeling

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- Now that we have our image planes set up, let's do some housekeeping so we can set this up for better modeling. The first thing I'm going to do is set up some layers. I'm going to go ahead and select one of my background images here. In this case, the side view. Let's go over to our object panel. I want to make sure that the layers is set to a different layer than layer one. That way all of my image planes are on a separate layer, so I can toggle them on and off very easily. I'm going to go ahead and select all of these and just work my way through. Make sure that the layers are different. With that, I have this layer here and I can just toggle that on or off or I can hold down shift and toggle this on with my other layers. Another thing I want to do is I want to make sure that I have all of my image planes fairly organized. I'm going to set up a hierarchy. I'm going to go ahead and add an object here called an empty. This is just a null object. And add an empty plane axis. That brings in this object here called empty. I'm going to go ahead and rename that as image planes so that I have a little bit more reference to it. Then I'm going to go through my objects again. This time, I'm going to make the parent that image planes object. You can see how when I do that they show up under here. So again, image planes, image planes, and image planes. There are other ways of doing hierarchies, but this is probably the quickest way for right now. One of the reasons I've done this is that now I have this image planes object that I can use. If I want to, I can move around or scale or manipulate all of my image planes at once. Another really handy thing is that it allows me to turn on and off all of my image planes from my outliner here. If I hold down the control key and click on this, I can turn them all on or off. Or I can do that on a per object basis. That can be very handy. Another thing is that I want to make sure that I don't accidentally select one of these image planes. If I'm modeling, I don't want to select one of these and move it out of the way. I want to lock these in place. We can do that by restricting selection here. I can restrict view port selection by clicking on this. If I click that off for the side view, I can't move the side view. One of the reasons I've put these in a hierarchy is that again, you can hold down the control and you can turn them all on or off for anything in the hierarchy. I'm going to go ahead and turn all of those off. Now we have them all in the hierarchy. One thing I forgot to do is that my image planes also needs to be in the other layer. I'm going to go ahead and select this. Make sure it's in this layer here. Now, I've got two ways to manipulate these image planes. I can turn them on or off as a layer or I can turn them on or off here in the outliner.

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