Hey guys it's Aaron, I want to look at something today that I think I do a lot of during live
models and some of my other modeling videos, but I maybe haven't touched on in a while. How,
why, what it is I'm doing, and that is, I just wanted to do a quick refresher on working with
reference imagery. So the idea here is I'm not going to go into photo match, this isn't matching
photos, this is not using the depth, setting the axis on a photo to match it in 3d space,
this is more about just having an image that I want to use as a reference. So there's a
couple ways I'm gonna talk about loading that in, we'll take a look at those right now.
Okay, so, in a recent live video we modeled a boat and I had some reference images, so one
of the options you can do with reference images of course it's simple is, if you have the setup to do
it is open SketchUp and then also open these other images. So, if I was to do something like this,
obviously this doesn't work great in my setup. I'm modeling just on my laptop screen here so
losing half my screen to an image and a plan is not ideal. This works real well of course
if you have multiple monitors which it seems like a lot of people do nowadays,
I could actually have this open over on the other monitor maybe blown up real
big and this next to it, where I could just kind of turn my head and look at the images
that sort of thing, that works really well. But, if I'm in a situation like I currently am,
losing half my screen to reference images is not really an option. So, now I have to look at some
different ways to import those reference images to use them. So, you can see there I actually have
two different types of images, one is actually a picture of the boat I'm trying to model,
the other is a set of plans. So, how I would want to import these, would be different
based on the type of image, so let's look at two different ways I would import these reference
images. The first one is pretty straightforward. I'm going to go to file. I'm going to say import
and I'm going to grab that plan, and I'm going to import it as an image. I'm going to go ahead
and import it and I'm just going to slap it on the ground and I'm going to blow it up nice and big,
so I can reference it. So, right now as I look at it I'm looking down from above
and this is pretty much how I would import this. So, this is gonna let me come in here
and you know trace details off of this to use one note might be to take a look at this
and possibly scale or possibly straighten. So, what do I mean by straightening? Let's
talk about that. So, right here I have a line going right down the middle, you can see that
down the middle of the boat, if I come to one end and I click on it and then I come along the other
end, so my red axis should be straight down the middle, but you can see it's just slightly off,
and if I look back here you can see it actually starts off on the center line and then by the
time it gets to the length of the boat it's off a little bit. So, what I would do in this case
is, I would draw a line on that center line because it's easier to have a line to snap to,
I'm going to do a group select to select both the image and the centerline,
then I'm going to go to rotate, click at one end,
and click at the other end, now I'm going to drag that end down until it snaps onto the red axis,
that way as I come in here I draw a line like this, look at that now, it's perfectly straight,
perfectly aligned so any lines that are supposed to align to straight now, I'm actually be able to
snap straight along there. The second idea is to scale it, so if I have a known quantity, if I know
how long this boat is from this point to this point, what I can do is, I can draw that line,
I can grab my tape measure and click one end to the other end, and then type in the length it's
supposed to be. So, this is a 42-foot ship, I can type 42 foot, enter, do you want to scale, yes,
and now this is to scale, so that is a good tool to have, that's a good way to get that image in.
If I was tracing shapes off of here that I want to use, that would be the way to do
it. My reference image, on the other hand, remember this picture I have right here,
this reference image, I don't know that I would want to pull it in and throw it on the ground,
this is good because I can trace actual geometry off of this plan with a reference image like that,
I more want to see the details and then hop in and try to copy or replicate them in my model,
so the way that I would import that would probably be different. What I would go about doing with
the solution that I've come up with lately especially, is to go into my styles,
click edit on my current style, and then click this fourth tab right here which is my watermark,
and load that image in as a watermark. So, I'll go ahead and grab that image hit open
and it's going to start by plopping it right in the middle like this, I can overlay it, an overlay
is going to be if I wanted to like show up in front of my model which I don't really want I want
to be in the background, so I click on background that puts my image in the back. It's huge... this
is like wallpaper on your computer huge, so I'm going to click next here, I can fade it out a
little if I want to, I'd find that I'd start to lose detail if I faded out so I generally leave
it complete on an image, and then what I'll do is hit position, rather than tiling or stretching and
then I'll stick it in the corner, so stick in the top left or lower right corner, and I'll scale it
so it's small, it gets small enough that I can still see the detail I want to get out of it,
but it's not going to like crowd me, you know? So I'm going to crowd my modeling screen,
what that lets me do because I put it in the background it means if I work on something big,
it's not going to get in my way, but if I want to come out like this I don't need another screen
to glance up and see this picture, it's kind of like I printed the picture out and just set
it here on my screen, and I don't lose any real estate by putting in the back to have it there.
So, there we go there's a couple ways you can get reference imagery into SketchUp on a single screen
using import image and watermark. Like I said, that was something that I just kept doing over
and over on our live models and I think I did it in a couple of skill builder videos and I'm like
I don't know that I've actually touched on what, why, when I do those things. So, it does depend
on the piece you have if you're working off of a scaled piece of content something like a plan,
“like a plan”, then you may want to import it and scale it and have it on the ground to reference.
If it's just something you want to glance up occasionally, having a second monitor is great,
I mean I'm not saying don't take advantage, I have a second monitor over there and if I'm
modeling something and I want to see the image, I put it over there on the second monitor, but if
I'm traveling if I'm away from my second monitor or something like that, you can use a watermark
to pull that image in and still reference it without actually eating up your modeling space.
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