Hi angeliclight,

> I think I've seen some here and there that use plans and
> arrange them along each axis, but I don't remember where.

There a few links for this style of using plan drawings here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1267.16
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=898.2

Those are pretty involved projects involving modeling cars though, that tends to be a fairly difficult area especially to start with, but it is one kind of modeling that commonly uses plan drawings for tracing aids.

To set up an image to use as a tracing aid in MoI, use the View / Image command from the side pane.


> Plus, most of the stuff I am interested in doing doesn't
> have plan reference - not sure if this makes a difference.

Yeah, that makes a very significant difference.

Basically if you have a plan drawing you can do things like using it to trace 2D curves.

But with just a general 3D photo reference you can't typically use that to directly trace off of.

There is a special kind of technique called "photogrammetry" (Wikipedia link) which involves specialized software that is oriented towards reconstructing objects from several angled general photos (rather than plan drawings).

That process is very different than how modeling in MoI works.

One software for doing that process that I've heard of before is PhotoModeler: http://www.photomodeler.com/index.htm .


Otherwise a general non-plan photo would not be something that you typically would use in MoI directly, but of course you could do things like look at it every once in a while to compare it to how your model currently looks like in the 3D view.

Mostly though MoI is focused on creating brand new objects from scratch rather than trying to exactly replicate something from other sources.


> More theoretical question, too - is the learning to model
> process extremly lengthy?

It is very hard to give an answer to this because it depends a lot on many of the specifics.

Do you require replicating an existing object to a very high tolerance, such as making a clone accurate to within 0.01 millimeters or something like that? If so then it will take a long time to get the skills necessary for that kind of a thing.

If you want to use a photo more as a source of inspiration to model simple objects that don't have to be exactly identical, then that is something that will be a whole lot easier.

So the time period to learn could be anything between 10 minutes to 10 years, depending on what you are specifically trying to do... Sorry to give you such a large range, but it just is not very feasible to narrow it down while talking in such general terms.

Different kinds of models and tasks just have much different levels of complexity.

- Michael