A lot of what I'm working on at the moment is building 3D models from 2D plan drawings. In doing this, keeping the drawing to "scale" is important, as without that, you are loosing the exact scale factor.

When you import an image into MoI, it usually makes me select a starting point then it sort of expands the drawing as I move in a direction. This creates a problem for me as I'm in effect loosing my scale as I can't get the drawing to be exactly 100% of the size very easily? Now the good part of MoI is that you can easily rescale things once you've got them built, but in doing small models, there are some size constraints on parts, and I'd like to work in the end scale as much as possible. With that in mind, if I have a scale drawing of something, is there a way to import the image into MoI at it's true scale, ie without me having to select a starting point and then expand the drawing to the desired size?

Hi Ryan - well bitmaps by themselves are just a collection of colored dots and do not actually have a real world scale factor stored inside them.

So there is not any way for MoI to just automatically recognize what scale the blueprint image is supposed to be at, you need to control that by how you specify the size when you place it.

You may want to draw a rectangle using the regular Draw curve > Rectangle command and then snap on to it when placing the image, or in MoI v2 there is an "Align" helper tool available here:



That Align tool allows you to handle registration of an image by picking 2 points on the image, and then picking 2 corresponding points in the model to align the image to your model space at your intended scale.

For a demo of how that works see here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1982.9

That Align tool in v2 is probably the easiest way to control the scale of a background image.

- Michael

For peace of mind and if there is no easy scaling element in my 2D, I will add a simple line or square before exporting and use Align in Moi.

Leonard