Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Setting Up the Reference Planes

Before you start modeling, you need to load into your scene the character designs you created in Chapter 5 as “background images” to use as a reference while modeling. This will definitely help a lot to define the right proportions of our character, Jim.

Some people prefer to load references in planes that they can see when they rotate the camera around the scene. You can do this by adding planes in the views you need to show and then adding the images to those planes as a texture. This can be a little tricky (especially before you learn to use materials in later chapters) but Blender actually offers two easy ways to use reference images.

Open the folder in which you have your images and drag them into the 3D ...