vitrite - transparent reference images

pior

This thing gives any Windows window (!) adjustable transparency. No theme installer, no crap, just an exe to lauch :
http://home.insightbb.com/~ryanvm/tinyutilities/vitrite/

Looks quite useless at first glance but I find it awesomely handy for likeness studies, reference checking aso.

http://home.insightbb.com/~ryanvm/tinyutilities/vitrite/shot1.png

It just needs a better sceenshot to show how nice this can be with a combo of an image viewer and a modelling app!

Vailias

Nice find Pior.

Slum

Pretty nice!

I wrote a utility similar to this a long time ago, called SuperTrace. It was specifically for the use that you suggested, Pior.

This makes me want to whip out my dusty programming hat and actually make my old program useful.

pior

Haaa! I just tried it a bit more and there is issues. Not bugs, just an issue related to the 'transparent reference image' thing:

Max cannot really be set to transparent, I guess that's because of DX9 being intense or something - and having the 3d app's buttons and menus to be transparent would be annoying anyways.

Hence that leaves the image viewer to be set to transparent and always on top... but if once the focus is put back to the modelling app and you start modelling, if you hit the 2d image area... you loose focus. Would there be a way to freeze it somehow? Ideas?

Michael Knubben

FOOL, didn't i show you a program that did just what you're asking for here? I'm pretty sure i did.
I can't remember the name now, but it was a tiny program as well, and i *think* it allowed you to set a mouse pass-through.

pearls before swine, i say! pearls before swine.

pior

Ghost-it!
http://home.rochester.rr.com/artcfox/GhostIt/

Works perfectly!

acc

That program is made of win.

Much thanks to you two.

killingpeople

would be cool if they added a transparency slider on the title bar.

Joao Sapiro

will surely come in handy when having to make some certain faces in mudbox thanks !

fogmann

But in Mudbox you can overlay the image plane (set depth at 0 and visibility to low percentage), so it already works perfectly for that purpose. And you can rotate, scale and translate image plane as well.

pior

Fog, actually yes! And that what made me search for a more all-purpose tool : to make it possible with every modelling package, and also to allow faster image switching, ie multiple angls of the same reference source with pgup/pgdwn for instance.

fogmann

Yes, it is a neat program, I checked it out, but it doesn't work with Maya though

pior

Did you try setting maya as normal/opaque and the reference picture as ghost? I know that when I tried Vitrite the Max viewport wouldn't let itself turned transparent unless in sowtware rendering mode.

fogmann

I tried both ghosting Maya and ghosting the image, but the results are almost the same: works over the interface, but the viewport is a real mess. I'm not aware of software rendering viewport setting for Maya, so I'm not sure if there's a way to make it work, or if it will work with most other 3D programs. On the ghost-it site it states:

Windows which draw directly to video memory (Windows Media Player and anything else that uses hardware acceleration) cannot be ghosted, nor have a ghosted window appear on top of them. The region which has direct access to the video memory will instead appear as a gray box.

and solution is:
Don't ghost any window which draws directly to video memory, and don't overlap any such window with a ghosted window.