Importing a reference image

- [Instructor] Before we begin creating our scene, let's take a look at the reference images and kind of get a feel of what we're going to create. So this is a coworking space in the building where I work. My office isn't in here, it's nowhere near this nice but I thought this would be a good environment to create. It's got a lot of different things going on here, even though it may not look real complicated. It's got the furniture and the walls and the doors and the windows, the ceiling tiles, the light fixtures. It actually has quite a bit going on here that I think it'd be pretty fun to create. If we kind of scroll through the images here, you can see I've just taken some images walking through of the furniture and the general layout of the space as well. So what we want to do is block in the walls, the floors, the ceilings, and to do that, we're going to use this floor plan here. If I zoom in a bit, we can see that it's got this blue line around it here, and that is the coworking space. This over here is just other office space. We're not going to concern ourselves with this over here. We're just going to work on what's inside the blue line here. So this is that main coworking space here. Here's that kitchen area and the counter. And then all the offices around here and even back into here. Now we'll create the walls and the windows and the doors for this area. But we may not add a whole lot of detail inside here. But I do want to create the whole thing so we can walk through the whole area. So how do we begin something like this? what do we start with? Well, I think what I'll do is bring this reference image into blender and put it on the floor, put it on the ground plane and then try and get this image to be real-world size. So when we get to the part of the project where we're going to create the lights for the scene, we're going to need our office space here to be real-world size because a lot of the shadows, light bounces, global illumination all of that really looks for real-world scale. So it can provide real world properties for the lighting. So our first task then is to get this image into blender and to the proper size. Alright, well, let's work on that. Let's go back to blender and we've got the cube, the camera, and this point light here. That's always in any new default scene. So to get rid of these, let's just press the A key to select everything and then we'll hit delete, and there they go. All right, so now, actually, before we begin, let's talk a bit about moving around in this 3D view. To do that, it's really just the middle mouse button. If you click the middle mouse button and hold it and move the mouse, you can tumble around. If you press the shift key and hold the middle mouse button down and move the mouse you can pan. And if you hold the control key down and click the middle mouse button and move the mouse, you can zoom in and out. Now you can also scroll the mouse wheel as well, turn it, and that'll zoom in and out as well. All right, so as I said, what I want to do is bring in that reference image and put it on the floor here so we can see where the walls will go. But also we need to get it to the proper size. So to bring in a reference image, what we can do is go to the create menu. Now we can come over here to add, and we can add a mesh, an armature, an image, and we're going to use this background image here. But we can also get to that add menu by pressing shift A and that will bring up the menu as well. So now let's come down here to image and background, and if we then browse to our folder where those reference images are, I can actually come over here and just click on this and that'll take me to that folder. I'll go ahead and click on the office floor plan and click load background image. And there we go. Now there's a problem. It's in line with where my camera view was when I brought it in. And that isn't what we want. Let's go ahead and hit the delete key. So as you can see, that image comes in aligned to your camera view. So we need to put our camera, basically looking down on the floor. And to do that, we can use the number pad keys on our keyboard. We can also go to view, viewpoint, and you can see here, that you've got the top view is numpad seven. The front is numpad one and the right view is numpad three. So for the top, what I'll do is, I'll just hit the seven key on the numpad and go to the top orthographic view right here. Now let's go ahead and press shift A, image and background, and I'll select that office floor plan once again. Here we go. Okay, now, if we tumble, there's still a problem. We can't see it here. What's happening is, if we go over here to this object data properties tab here, we can see for this empty, for this background image, the display perspective or display in the perspective view is turned off. So let's just turn that on. And there we go. Now we can see our image. All right, but is it the right size? How do we know that? Well, we don't really have any measurements on this floor plan to work with. Oftentimes, if you have blueprints, you're going to get the measurements for the walls and the doors, et cetera. But for here, we don't have that. So we're going to have to kind of wing it just a bit. So I happen to know that the doors are about 40 inches wide. So what we could do is, we could create an object, say just a cube that we know is 40 inches wide. And then we could scale up our image here so that the doorways here match the width of our object. I think that's probably the way to go. But first, what I'd like to do is take this center of the grid here. And I want it to be in the center of this coworking suite so that when we create a new object, it pops into this area here. I'm going to kind of consider this the home area or the center of the scene that we're going to create. So what I can do is I can come over here to this offset X and Y, and I can move this whole thing with these fields. So first of all, what I'll do is I'll take this offset X and I'll click and I'll drag and you can see, I can kind of slide this over by click and drag in that field there. And then I can maybe click and drag on the Y field and drag that over here like this. There we go. So that kind of puts that center of the grid into the center of what I'm thinking is are seen here. Now you can type in values here if you want. I can type in, say negative 2.5 and let's type in negative .6 here. Here we go. So now we know that's the center of our scene. All right, now let's go ahead and create an object here that we can set as the proper size. I'll press shift A once again and we'll come up here to mesh and cube, and there we go. Now we've got a cube. And if we hit the end key to open up the sidebar here, we can see that this cube is two meters by two meters. So that tells us that our floor plan here is probably way too small. But let's change the size of the cube to get at the proper size of the width of the door. What I'll do is I'll go to Google and let's type in 40 inches, 40 inches in meters right here. And let's see what it says. So it says, it's 1.01, maybe almost 1.02 meters for 40 inches. All right, well, let's come over here then. And in the dimensions, let's maybe in the Y axis, let's type 1.02 and hit enter. And so that's how wide our doors should be, okay. What I'll do now is come over and click on this move tool. And now we can see the X, Y, and Z axes here fairly easily. I'm going to scale in the X to bring this in just a bit. So I'll press S and the X key, and I'll move a mouse there. All right, so there is the width of our doors. And if we take a look at the width of our doors in the image, there's quite a difference there. So what let's do in the next video, is let's work on getting the floor plan, the proper size and begin blocking in the walls where this blue outline is. So that's coming up next.