Thanks for the replies.
Photofly is coming out from Autodesk. It is in beta.
It is very powerful, enabling anyone with a camera to 'scan' objects, shoes, rooms, or entire buildings
into the computer. This process creates meshes that have textures and great detail. I can see a greater
need for what I am suggesting fairly soon. I work in the entertainment industry. Getting real life scans
into the viewport is important. Thanks again.

Hi blackhoney - just in general the focus for MoI is on drawing things from scratch and not so much on reverse engineering scanned model data, if that helps explain why that has not been a priority so far.

I can understand that it would be helpful for various situations, but I've got to figure out some way to integrate it so that people don't get confused and wonder why their just opened file behaves totally differently than something that they drew.

If you have any ideas on how to implement this without that kind of confusion happening, that would probably make it more feasible to develop this area in a shorter timeframe.

I think it probably would have to go on some other kind of entry point than just File > Open, something more like a special "open reference model" type command but I'm not sure where to place something like that in the UI. Maybe importing a reference image (currently the View > Image command) could be grouped with it somehow, but I don't have a clear idea yet of how the UI for that would be organized.

Uncertainty in the UI design tends to mean that a feature will take a while to develop.

Long term coherence and good UI design are important goals for MoI so if the UI for something is not clear yet it tends to mean that it won't be developed yet as well - in general with MoI I'm trying to avoid just slapping together a bunch of features and ending up with a bloated and messy UI.

- Michael

Maybe changing the 'image' button to 'reference' and give the choice to load it there.
It could behave in the same manner of an image, with tranparency, etc.

Marc

Hi Marc, I'd kind of like to find a better place for Image as well - it seems that fairly often people don't think to go to the View tab to find it when they are first starting out with MoI.

- Michael