Wouldn't it be nice if we could align images

[Max Lloyd]

I'm playing around with a little job for my parents in the US, and I was just trying to get a perspective view of a building to tie up with a photo they have sent me in order to do a photo montage. I have tried doing montages before without much success. Mainly as I have found it very difficult to get the exact camera position to tie up.

Something very obvious came to mind.

If I could just overlay the photo onto my (say hidden line) perspective view in Revit, I could then spin, dolly, go forward or backwards and easily line up my camera view with that of the photo. The overlay should have the facility to be partially transparent, or be sent behind or even in front of the model. The photo would simply be static with you adjusting your view to tie the two up.

This would even help with getting the lighting to tie up as you could switch on the shadows in say a shaded view and play with the sun location until you were happy. When it comes to rendering, you would then just use the shadow settings from that view.

It might even be there is a benefit to have the option of the image rendering as a background image?

I do realise that some experienced users are able to make montages, but I'm sure its fairly complicated and in my experience, involves a lot of trial and error. IMHO this would make creating a montage a far easier process.

What do you guys think?

Max.

[Joef]

What I have done is taken my hidden line perspective view into Photoshop, (though Gimp would probably do as well) created 2 layers, one with the photo and one with the hidden line. I then turn the transparency to 30% or so on the hidden line layer to get an idea of how it matches up with the photo. You can then get a good idea of what you need to change to get it to appear correctly. Two important things that I learned here in this forum are to have an object in both the photo and the rendering that are the same size and in the same location, and to know where the photographer was standing.
Your suggestion is very good though, and would speed up the process.

Joe

[mibzim]

I hear you max - wouldnt it be great if revit could handle images at least as well as the simplest of programs, like MS Word for eample? Some simple transparency send to front / back, rotate, crop settings, etc would be wonderful!

Keep our fingers crossed for revit 9!

[barathd]

My fingers are already in knots.

[Arnel Aguel]

That would be nice.....

One very important thing also to add is that the camera must be able to show the horizon (similar to viz/max) because no matter how you dolly your camera if the target point is not the same height you wont be able to get it right. By showing the horizon of the camera that will give you more or less exact reference to align also the horizon of the background image.

just my 0.02 centavos....

[Max Lloyd]

That would be nice.....

One very important thing also to add is that the camera must be able to show the horizon (similar to viz/max) because no matter how you dolly your camera if the target point is not the same height you wont be able to get it right. By showing the horizon of the camera that will give you more or less exact reference to align also the horizon of the background image.

just my 0.02 centavos....
Agreed. That would help. Surely this idea can't be too tricky as we can already import images into plans and elevation views?

[David J Krope]

I like this too Max. I have attempted montage twice in Revit and Photoshop and it is alot of error and error. Were you going to push this over to the wish list?

[Tobie]

This is going to sound stupid, but i have done a few now where I trace the main elements of the photo with the boundaries on tracing paper. I then open the Revit camera view and spin and adjust image until I have a close match.
Go ahead and laugh, everyone in the office over here has a smile on their faces when i do it, but it works for me, until we can do it in Revit.

[Wes Macaulay]

That's hilarious, Tobie! But a good idea nonetheless...

[Max Lloyd]

Tobie,

No laughter here. Honestly, that was the solution I was going to try (except I was going to print the photo to transparent film) then tape it to my monitor and work underneath it!

Ok, laugh if you like, but I remember trying to take my scale rule to my monitor some years back in autoCad whilst trying to figure out printing to scale! (Ok, I've learnt a little bit since then!)

[Wes Macaulay]

Hey, I may laugh, but I'm using the idea nonetheless! :cool:

[Dimitri Harvalias]

I thought this sounded familiar...

http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=6005&highlight=image+monitor