In this video, I'll talk about the importance of reference, how to find it and how to assemble it together into an easy to use reference board. [MUSIC] In this video, I'm going to talk about how we can gather references and images that we can use to make sure that our models look photorealistic. Hi there, Andrew here. So, this is the first video on this series where I'm going to be modeling out these Fujinon TS1440 marine binoculars. I have a folder here full of images from lots and lots of different angles. This is the model in particular that I'm going to be making. I picked these because they have a lot of interesting features and they have a lot of really interesting modeling challenges to overcome. We have, in terms of what it's made of, a lot of plastics and metal. We have labels, we have glass lenses. We have things like fabric on the sides here. As well as we have a couple of interesting areas. For instance like some of these features in the front that at first, they're going to look like, how do you even model some of these. But I hope of the course of these videos to show you how we can take all these features on one at a time. Whenever I'm doing a big project, I like to make sure I'm spending at least 20% of my overall development time on purely research. Kind of think about like a 20% rule in general. For instance, if I'm spending a week on an asset, I might spend a whole day doing nothing but research in terms of how it works, where it was made, dimensions and information. And that's some of the things I've gathered here. Now of course, a lot of these images were gathered using image search. But I've also included some things like, some diagrams and how binoculars work. As well as a little diagram on how image stabilized binoculars work. And a little text file that I have here that I've written down as much relevant information as I can find about the actual object. All of these things will really come into play later. As many of these close up details as you can get, the better. So you can see I have a couple of close ups of labels. I might have to recreate those later, or I might be able to grab those from Photoshop. And I'm looking for a couple images for instance, this one right here is great. Because not only these are a large image size, this is 1200x1200 pixels. But because it's so straight on, this will be a nice image for us to throw on the background of our Maya scene. And actually be able to use this in the background as reference to model against. When I was first starting out in modelling, I might take all these images. I might put them in a Photoshop document, or throw them off to another monitor. But there's a new tool that we have called PureRef. And I'm going to show you a little bit about the setup that I have right here with this PureRef file. So, PureRef lets me take images, drop them into the scene and organize them. You can see here, here's a final organized PureRef folder, it's got my details, it's got side views, top views, bottom. I try to categorize these and organize them together, so three-quarter view, some front views. I've also dropped in a note that includes all those details I wrote. So I had this little PureRef file here, all the resources information I'm going to need for this whole project. So starting with the a brand new one, what I'm going to do is take all the images in my Fujinon folder. Of course, I don't want the actual text file or this PureRef file. And I'm just going to drag and drop them into the PureRef scene. What it's going to to give me at first is everything sorted out and stack together. There's no organization and everything's the same size. If I select by dragging them for all of these and right click, I can come down to images and normalize them by size. So this is sort of sorted, and try to give all these basically the same size. And what I can do is start sorting and dragging them over. For instance, I might start taking all the case pieces that I can find in pulling these in, looking for all the front and back views. Navigating in this is pretty easy. Right mouse click moves the whole thing around whereas middle mouse click will let me drag through it. So, a three button mouse is definitely essential for this kind of assignment. I'm just for now going to sort it by views of the actual object, close up views. And images of the case. I can always break these down later. And I might see that as I went through, I'm going to get some duplicates. Because maybe in my searching and pulling things down, I accidentally grabbed two of the same image. It's pretty easy to just select one and delete it. And it won't delete the file or anything, it'll just delete it off of the actual PureRef board. One of the really nice things about PureRef is when I actually save this file, it saves all of the images with it. Meaning that I don't have to worry about loading this up on another computer, and it telling me that it's missing a bunch of image files. So more details. Pulling out some more cases, let's stack all these together. I definitely have a lot of duplicates of the same side view. Couple diagrams, what I can do for instance with all of these case pieces when I want to sort them, if I hit Ctrl or Command+P on my keyboard. It's going to arrange them in the most ideal way possible. And then I like to do Ctrl+N to add a note, and give it some detail. The other thing I can do, if you recall I wrote this little text file. And then my version, I had this whole text file with all of its details here. I just copy all this text. Create a new note. And now I just type all of that text in, like so. And now, with the Ctrl+Alt and left click, I can scale it, and I can move it just like any other element. This is really helpful for me, maybe if I'm doing a scene or environment too. I'll make notations about how tall things are, or how much there is. These days, even though I have two monitors, I almost always use this in my scene. So when I want to save this, all I have to do is go to save, save as. I can pick a location, give it a name like Fujinon. And remember, if you make any changes to it, you want to save it just like any other file. I'm actually going to close this because as I've shown you before, I actually have a reference board here that I really like. With Maya open here, we can see that it's trying to go over top of the board. But we can change this by right clicking on it, and setting it's mode to always on top. What this means is that if I only have one monitor, I have two monitors in my current setup. But if I only really had room for one monitor while I was working in Maya. I can scale this using the left mouse button, moving it with the right mouse button. And them I'm free to navigate zoom in and look at different details on my model wherever I'm going. This is going to be really helpful for us as we're modelling to be able to zoom in on areas and identify what the shape should be. So much of the challenge of modelling is going to be trying to look at something like this and figuring out what is happening there. What does this thing really look like? Because we're working from photos, sure, but photos have perspective, they have fall off, and that's often going to make trouble for us. So now that I have my PureRef board, I'm going to save it, just Ctrl+S. And my next thing to do is start setting up some parameters for my overall scene. [MUSIC]
