Background image in viewport

how about being able to add a background image that displays all the time in any view? at the moment you can only see the background image in ortographic view, and in a front/side/top view…

i would like to navigate around my mesh while having a still image in the background for as referance. this can be really helpfull when you are not working with a front/side referance…

also i have limited space with only 1 monitor, so having the referance image in a separate viewport is not so easy for me.

one way to work around this is to add a background image, and lock the camera to view. however this limits me slightly. i have to keep the camera locked in order to see the image, and if i want to view the image form front/side, ill then have to go back into camera view when i want to navigate in the viewport in order for the image to show up. also i cant view through the camera in orthographic view unless i enable it in the camera settings. though that can be a bit frustrating, having to manually swich between ort and perp view every time…

so my suggestion in a nutshell would be let us see the image in “Viewport” view aswell, EXSACTLY as it does when you lock the camera to view.

[video]http://i.gyazo.com/b1741306121d7f64d9a9f1096a248d38.gif[/video]

add an empty to your scene and set the display type of your empty to image. You can then load your reference images to the empty. I believe this closer to how other programs deal with reference images . you can work with your images regardless of how view-port’s orientation

well that will be the same as adding a plane. the problem with that is you wont have the image in the background regrardless of witch angle you are looking from.

did you really just decide “i want to learn how to draw”, so you started a thread where you post all of them, and desided to go all the way to 500 without stopping?
that is huge respect man. really well done. i would never had the motivation to set such a huge goal and show off my early progress…
Good luck! i hope you succeed!

If you are not afraid of trying testbuilds of Blender, you can go for 2.74 that have the functionality you want

How’s this? I just built from master 5 minutes ago and I’m not seeing it.

so you say 2.74 does not have this feature?

im not afraid of downloading 2.74 but i wont bother if there isnt anything usefull there :slight_smile:
like i first upgraded form 2.70>2.73 because of the texture preview. so i had a reason :wink:

The reason I said that was the documentation about Blender 2.74. Look here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74/More_Features it says there that you can Background images can now be rotated and flipped. Myaybe I did not understand you correctly if that was what you wanted.