Create Reference Image Planes - Mel Script
 

Hrr...here it is :)

My first, not complete, not optimized, not fully tested, propably buggy but somewhat usable I hope :D

Just extract it in your "My Documents/maya/scripts" folder and type "refplanes;" in the command line (or make a shelf button).

c & c + bugreports are welcome.

How to use it...
 

I forgot that there is no documentation so you prolly don't know what to do with it :) Here's a brief explanation.

The script creates polygon planes with reference images for top, side and front views. Leave the image file name blank if you don't wish to create that plane.

It also creates a locator and adds a new attribute to it. With this attribute you can control the transparency of the planes.

The planes are also added to a new layer called REF_PLANES which is set to "reference" mode so you don't accidentally select them.

That's about it. I still need to work on the placement of the planes. For now you may wish to move them manually.

Here's a screen shot:

interesting, just wait for others to test it. i dont have anything that has front side top images which i could use to model. and trying out the anatomically perfect pictures of body parts i am not good enough to model yet - and i would not know how too put skin on top of the muscles :D

One other thing...I believe this doesn't work on any other platform than NT (at least the browse buttons won't I think).

I'll be sure to try it out for my next project, kman. :D

Great work K! I´ll be sure to test drive it tomorrow ...

interesting work man.. i'll be checkin' it out too.. :p

Looks like a really cool script kbrown though i can't get it working. I run the script, browse for the images but when i click go, i receive the error, the source attribute cannot be found. :confused:

mrmacca: could you please turn on the Script->Show Line Numbers (in the script editor) and try to run it again. Then paste the error with the line number so I can debug this better.

Oh, and which maya version and os are you using?

i'm running version 4 on xp pro, here's the error..

// Error: file: C:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/maya/4.0/scripts/refplanes.mel line 222: The source attribute cannot be found. //

Is that what you needed?

Yes, thanks. I'll look in to this later today...

Updated the script to V0.0.3

-Removed the place2dTexture nodes from the ref plane shaders. There was some version conflicts and they're not used for anything anyway.
-Set the starting folder to "<current project>/sourceimages".

Known issues
I didn't make the script connect the transparency attributes of the file texture node due to
some different behaviour between maya 4.5 and earlier versions. I think you can connect them
manually if you're using 4.0 (so you can benefit from a possible alpha channel stored in the image).

Oops, I screwed up :)

Here's the file:

hey great work k-man!!!! cheers