This update is mainly about workflow improvements and tools. I stumbled upon the “Dolly Zoom & Track Shift” on blender market. It makes it so much easier to imitate the focal length of the camera. The fspy tool already got me big way, but I noticed that the focal length was still slightly off. This tool finally alLowed me to adopt the FOV of the camera without moving the camera around and therefore improve the accuracy of the image plane. Unfortunately, this meant that the mule didn't match the image plane perfectly anymore and I had to slightly move a lot of parts around. I wish I knew this addon from the beginning. I will make the tool a fix part of my workflow when recreating objects from images. Here the link to the tool:
https://blendermarket.com/products/dolly-zoom--truck-shift
I also made some image planes for the sides that use a different aspect ratio. Unfortunately, the camera aspect ratio is always tied to the output resolution. It is therefore not possible to use a camera-based image plane in landscape and portrait mode at the same time. And when changing from one camera to another, you always need to change the resolution as well. I was thinking about writing an addon to organize my cameras but decided to focus on the actual modeling. Finally, I simply hard coded the different image sizes and assigned them to different buttons. I think it is a good compromise between not over engineering things and still being helpful. Further I created a custom Pie menu to toggle between them even faster:
As the scene is growing bigger and more complex I started to loose to overview on individual elements. At this point it gets important for me to structure and organize my scene better. I have therefore started to organize reusable parts in collections an arrange them in a library collection. Spliting the machine in individual components and organize them in the library collection is an ongoing process.
The blender scene is currently organized in 3 main collections. I can use the number keys 1,2,3 to quickly toggle between them. 1) contains the components library, 2) contains the assembled scenes and 3) contains the image plane cameras and other utilities. Together with the possibility to overwrite collections in a individual viewport it allows me to see the assembled machine with the image plane while working on the instantiated elements in another view.
