The online help states that “Background images are editable while you are inside this command. Click and drag on an image to reposition it. Dragging on a corner frame widget allows scaling of the image, and dragging on the rotation widget allows rotating the image. A click and release on the rotation widget instead of click and drag enables a different rotation mode that shows a 3-wheel rotation gizmo. When that gizmo is enabled you can click and drag on any of the 3 wheels to rotate around any of the 3 axes”.

This is fine but I find the manipulation of images rather cumbersome. It is hard to get them to the same scale and the proper orientation. It would be nice if I could import the image at its existing size and if the 3-wheel rotation gizmo had ortho settings, so that I could orient an image at say 90°. The angle input field at the bottom of the window does not seem to word.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Just draw first a normal Rectangular Plan
Rotate as you want
Then Import Import image and draw it over the Plan
Kill the Plan
So image will be in the rotated wished place ;)
But you right a 3D rotated function image will be more confortable :)

I think the wishlist also has a request to have the object and straight snaps work with images, which would solve these placement and sizing issues.

Hi Burr,

> I think the wishlist also has a request to have the object and
> straight snaps work with images, which would solve these
> placement and sizing issues.

Actually object snaps do work on images while you are inside the Image command.

For instance if you grab an image nearby its corner point and drag it, you will get an "End" snap there, and you can drag it and snap it to the corner of another image.

Maybe you are looking for something else other than that though?

- Michael

Well let me fool with it a bit. I was thinking more like, "If I know that edge in the picture is supposed to be 6 inches, then I could draw a six inch line and drag the picture from that point to snap to it. (Havnt thought that through or how it would work). I just remembered we did discuss this before and thought it was added in as future development.

Michael,
My bad. Seems "Align" does exactly what I was refering to! It has already been added.

Sorry,
Burr

Hi JPB,

It may be easiest for you to draw in a regular rectangle object first, and adjust that as needed and then place the background image using the rectangle object as a guide.

Also normally if you want to place an image at a 90 degree angle to the world plane, it is just easiest to draw it in one of the other views, for instance the Front view or Right-side view. If you switch to those views and draw your image it will be at one of those orientations right from the beginning and won't need to be rotated around with the tri-wheel at all.

Maybe I'm not understanding what your goal is though, can you show something for what kind of result you are trying to get?


> It would be nice if I could import the image at its existing size

Images are made up of pixel dots, they don't quite have a "size" in geometry units like a rectangle or line object does. They do sometimes have a "dots per inch" value associated with them (not always though), but that is more of a suggested physical print size.

So I'm not quite sure how that would be possible to do.

If you are very interested in controlling the size to an exact amount, it is definitely easiest right now to do that one by drawing a rectangle first (where you can enter width and height explicitly) and then snapping on to that.

Again, maybe if I can see what kind of result you are looking for I may understand more about what you are asking for with regard to controlling the size.


> and if the 3-wheel rotation gizmo had ortho settings, so that I
> could orient an image at say 90°. The angle input field at the
> bottom of the window does not seem to word.

It looks like a bug there - the angle constraint is working for rotating a regular object with the tri wheel (which is something new for version 2.0), but not an image. I'll see about fixing that up. But that is a kind of relative constraint, that lets you control an angle rotation for how much the current drag operation will alter the angle, not an "absolute" angle property.

But if you want full 90 degree orientations, I don't quite understand why you're not drawing the images in one of the Top/Front/Right views to have it that way right from the beginning...

- Michael

Revisit the image "Align" command. It does this and the angle works in the rotation part of the command.

I suppose the only thing is it is not working with the "Editframe". But if all that functionality was in the edit frame there would be no need for an align command.

Hi Burr, yeah the image align is new for v2 and lets you do a kind of pick a reference distance and orientation in the image and map that to match with an existing object in your model.

That's for things like where you want to map your blueprint to match with portion of your model which is not aligned with the world axes.

Previous thread on that here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1982.9

- Michael

Yeah, it also does the size thing I was refering to as I can pick the corner of an "object in the picutre" for instance and drag the pictures size and snap on an existing lines end to have the "edge in the picture" be a specific size in my workspace.

Very cool. Exactly what was requested before.

Burr

Hi Burr, it looks like I should probably add the End and Mid snaps in for the initial line pick with that image align command though.

- Michael

Hi JPB - also you might want to check that you have Object Snap enabled - it will have an orange highlight on it when it is turned on.

If that is turned off that can make it more difficult to match things up.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your first class feedback and assistance !

In the meantime, I was able to get by pretty much as you suggested. The remaining issue is not so much orientation of the background images as their relative scales. I often have to use single drawings from planes or ships that show several different angles of view, for example profiles and sections. Using Photoshop and the like, I can separate the various views, but I usually have to spend a lot of time adjusting the different views so that they match.

I mean, assuming that I disregard scale entirely, I lay out the first view in MoI, but then it is a struggle fiddling with the other views so that they are properly oriented and at the same scale. I though it wise to use the same original drawing (i.e. including itels relvant to several views) in all three orientations, lay it out three times in the same plane using snap of the first instance and then orienting two of them in the other directions (hence the need to orient them precisely) and use only the part of each drawing relevant to that view, but it proved very confusing. Using a rectangle or a cube I can more or less orient the drawings (the often get inverted, right coming out as left etc., and it is still very much a trial and error process.

And on top of that, most of the time, I find out that the original drawings do not match by a huge margin and that they need considerable doctoring! That is definitely not a MoI issue, though.

I need to try all that once more. I may have a mental block preventing me of doing what I want in a simple and easy way as everybody else seems to be able to do…

Hi JPB, yeah if the original images do not match then that is going to get in the way quite a bit!

You'll probably want to prepare the images to have the same aspect ratio (proportion of width to height) also, since MoI will maintain the aspect ratio of an image and won't squish it non-proportionally.

Also it is not quite clear to me what you are trying to do with the scale - is there a legend or reference line in these images that you can use to set the scale? If so then MoI does not have anyway to automatically recognize that (that would take some kind of artifical intelligence to try and process the image pixel dots as something other than just a bunch of colored dots), but you can use the Align tool in the MoI v2 beta to set the scale of such a reference line pretty easily.

Here is a demo of how that works - you pick 2 reference points in the image and then you you pick 2 reference points in your model and the image is scaled and placed so that those registration lines will align with one another:



If you use a horizontal line it won't adjust the rotation.

Normally once you place one image, it should be pretty easy to match another one to it exactly from another view by looking for the "end" snaps (but making a box that is easily viewable from all directions is not a bad idea...).

The way that works is first in your top view place the initial image, get it to the proper scale and position that you want everything else to be aligned to, that will look something like this:



Now if I switch to the Front view and draw a new image there, I can pick up the 2 end points snaps to give it a precise alignment, like this:



When you go to move an image, start your drag a little bit to the inside of the corner so that you don't scale it instead - the scale grip will highlight if you are close to it so move a little away from that if you want to move it rather than scale.

If you want images at a 90 degree aspect to one another, you'll likely be better off drawing them like I show above so that they already are 90 degrees to each other right from the start and just totally avoid the rotation tri-ball thing completely. Also if you're having problems knowing where those end snaps are, you can just draw an imprecise one in the view to start with and then once it is placed at that 90 degree angle to the other one it should be pretty easy to switch to the 3d view for moving it and also scaling it to match the other image - I show moving it in the above screencap but scaling is easy to do in there as well once it is already at the rotation that you want.

Getting the images initially placed at 90 degrees will probably help make things quite a bit easier.



> (the often get inverted, right coming out as left etc.

That kind of thing can happen if you grab a scale corner and then drag it over past the opposite edge of the image, the image will become mirrored with that kind of dragging.


But if your images do not have a proper alignment to them like if they are different aspect ratios, then that's going to be a big problem that you'll want to adjust before bringing them into MoI.


Again, it is hard to for me to exactly understand what you are running into without actually seeing some stuff rather than just trying to imagine from descriptions. If you could include just a couple of the images and possibly show one kind of arrangement that you want to place them in (even with just an approximate sketch or something), that would be a lot easier for me to give you some more specific tips for that...

But I hope this much helps anyway though!

- Michael

Also here is a demo of how to align 2 images with one another when the second one has just been initially placed quickly in the Front or Right-side view:




One key thing to notice there is that I grab the upper-right scale corner, and not the lower-right one.

That's because the anchor point is mostly what you want to control there - if you look closely when I move the mouse over the grip, you can see this anchor icon that shows where the fixed point for the scale is at:



The anchor for the scale will be the opposite diagonal corner, so the grip that is diagonally opposite of the point you want to stay fixed is the one that you want to drag, not necessarily the one that is actually closest to your final destination point... That may be a little trick that was getting in your way.

In v2 you can also click and release on one of those corner grips to switch the anchor from corner to the center of the image. So if you see it go to the center, it means you did a click and release on the grip, and do another click on it to flip it back to corner mode again.

- Michael

I had thought of this sort of rotation ;)
Easy to draw it at the Loading on the inclined face
Image rotate from plan to any angle but it is not visible from the "Right" side !
Align don't work from plan to inclined face

Hi Pilou,

> I had thinking of this sort of rotation ;)

I think that's probably not the kind of alignment that JPB is talking about, although hard to say without seeing any actual sketches or illustrations of the original question.

But if you want to do what you show there, just snap the points on to that plane when you initially place the image and you're done, here is an example:



You can also set the cplane as another way to control how the image will be placed when you draw it.

- Michael

Hi Pilou - I see now you mean rotate from an odd angle down to the plane?

For that I would just recommend drawing a brand new image flat on the plane and delete the old angled one, that is a simple way to get that result.

Maybe in the future I can get the tri-ball rotation to handle that case, but that will be overall more complicated, why not just use the simple way that already works?

- Michael

yes when you draw first that easy but seems impossible if image is yet existing ;)
Edit Cross posts :)
Yes you right why not use existing easy thing :) It's not me who asked a rotation at the first post :)

Hi Pilou,

> yes when you draw first that easy but seems
> impossible if image is yet existing ;)

Yeah it won't work to modify the existing image, but it's not impossible to get the final result you want. Just delete the existing one and draw a new one and you will have it...

Does that do the job you want there? If so then I'm not sure if there is really a problem that needs to be solved.

- Michael