In blender, I've seen some tutorials telling how to place a picture in the background of the orthographic view to model that way, but I've also seen more professional modelers say that it's better to put them on the central axis for better reference. Do I need to make three intersecting planes and somehow put the pics on them? or is there a blender function for that? I'm extremely new at modelling and at blender, so I'll be taking baby steps.
Whoever said that is a fool. Blueprints only guide you in orthographic view of the exact front, side, rear, etc of your model. Setting it up on the axes as actual textured geo is identical to setting background images. You don't need to change your blueprint setup.
Personally i use the intersecting planes method. However, like Zappymouse said, the modeling is still done in Orthographic view. So in the end this is the same as setting up background images. The only reason I use the planes method instead of background images is so I can easily set the proportions and sizes of the blueprints.
Im aware that modelling is done in Orthographic view, i barely use perspective view in blender. But i have seen multiple times that that intersecting planes method is preferred as Dummiesman said. How do you do this?
First off, create a plane, and make sure its position is at 0,0,0 Go to Edit mode, select all vertices, then change your view to UV Editing up top (default is "Default") On the UV mapper, click the "Open" button on the bottom, and select your top blueprint image At this point, rotate the plane to make the front of your car face Y+ (the green arrow). To do this, I'm going to press "R Z 180" on my keyboard (while my mouse is in the 3d view), which will rotate the plane 180 degrees to face Y+ Now that I've done this, I want to finally scale the image up to the proper aspect ratio. In my case, I need to scale the Y axis by 4. To do this, I'm just going to press "S Y 4" on my keyboard. (while my mouse is in the 3d view) To setup my side blueprint, I want to go into Object mode, and select our top blueprint The next thing I want to do, is to press SHIFT+D to duplicate the top blueprint, then right click to duplicate in place. What I want to do with this duplicate, is turn it into my side blueprint. To do this, I have to press "R Y 90" on my keyboard to rotate this plane 90 degrees. Using the process above, I now need to go into Edit mode, load the side texture, and apply it. The reason the texture looks so odd, is because I need to rotate the UV -90 degrees. All I need to do is press "R -90" on my keyboard, while my mouse is in the UV view. Then "S Y 0.25" (1/4th original height), and "S X 4" (4x original width) to fix proportions. Or you could manually adjust the UV vertices if that's too confusing. At this stage, all that's left to do, is use that fancy blue arrow to move the blueprint up, so the wheels touch the top blueprint. HINT: While modeling, I advise you to have at least one light source in your scene, or else you won't see any shading while modeling in "texture" mode. Or else everything will show up completely white. Also, you may from time to time need to wireframe ONLY your mesh. To do this, press the N key while in edit mode, scroll down to the "Shading" section, and tick "Hidden wire"
