Jonah wrote:
> Rhino 4 has this feature called Picture Frame.

Yes I know, I added it to Rhino! :) It has been there since version 1.0, although 1.0 didn't have the rendered view shaded mode to go along with it.

You should be able to get a close equivalent to PictureFrame in MoI now by using images with the "Draw: With objects" style.


I do want to add texturing into MoI eventually, but I don't think that it is really a replacement for dedicated background images.

One problem with a rendered picture frame is that it is shaded by the light which changes the brightness of the image, even in a simple top-view-only tracing scenario.

For example make a small image and make it pure white - in Rhino go to the top view and set up a picture frame. If you look at the picture frame, you can see that it is not white, it has become darkened a bit due to lighting effects. In the 3D view you can see much more dramatic darkening due to lighting.

The other problem is that just a plain textured surface doesn't support either underlay or overlay type display layering modes, which I think are quite useful options for reference images.

So it is helpful to have a specialized tool for background images that can provide these types of specific features that are not important for normal textured objects.


> **PS - the other nice thing about using a surface with displayed image is
> that it will support trimming/splitting operations. So it's especially
> helpful for visualizations such as architectural, using planes to
> represent background objects (or people) in a scene. trim away the
> parts of surface you don't need...

True, this is one positive aspect of doing images through regular render texturing.

But as far as people or object stand-ins go, you can do that with MoI's images by using an alpha channel for the areas that you want to trim away. In fact you should be able to get better results by using alpha for this since you can have some partially translucent blended areas around borders instead of a severe on/off like a trim will produce. It should also be a lot easier task to set up the borders as alpha in a bitmap program since you will have things like the magic wand tool to help you, instead of having to trace the borders as geometry to trim with.

- Michael