Align Models to an image on the scene.

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out something for the past few weeks, still haven't got a perfect solution to it.
How do I align models to an image on the scene? I have a scene with an image of a city in the background (which will also appear on the render) and I am trying to align some models to the buildings on the image. These buildings will be used as a target for attacks.

Steps I have tried so far:
1. I thought of doing everything in the 3ds max's front viewport with the image perfectly aligned to the viewport and then aligning the models to the buildings on the image. The problem here is that I have a space ship entering the scene after a few frames and I see that some sides of the space ship are not visible on the render cause the render is from the front viewport.

2. Secondly I thought of putting the image as a viewport background using ALT + B and then aligning the objects, but this step is very tedious as I move or pan around the scene then the whole alignment is lost.

3. Finally I tried creating a static camera with the image being the main focus covering the entire viewport and then aligning objects. In this way I don't have much play area to send in the fighters that comes down from the space ship to attack the city as the camera is very close to the image.

Trying to master Pflow systems & FumeFX with this project. I really wanted to do this.

Please advise on any other workarounds.

I have posted some screen shots:
1. The Image.
2. The buildings aligned using the front viewport.
3. The fighters
4. The Spaceship

Thanks all

[Anonymous]

The way I've done this in the past is like this:

- make a camera in the scene
- load the photo as the background image for the camera viewport
- make a plane in the scene.
- adjust the camera position, rotation and lens value until the roads match up with the plane segments. Luckily you have a nice grid of roads to match up to.

Then any objects you drop in and move about should look correctly positioned in the photo.

I'm sure there's a better way of doing this. But this process takes about 5 mins and produces reasonable results. So I keep on doing it this way.

There is also this utility you can look at:
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/files/GUID-2C52CD7A-8FBF-4135-B677-2B49D21BC868....

Alex

[Anonymous]

Thanks Alex,

Thanks for the nice explanation.

Actually the link to the tutorial you provided helped me a lot. I am going on with the method you mentioned.

Thanks again.