Reference Plates Setup

To set up the reference plates I created a plane and then applied a material, with the reference plates bitmap assigned to it, to the plane. I adjusted the self illumination so that the images would not be affected by the lights in the scene.

When I opened the material editor (m) I found  that the slate material editor was being used.

Slate material editor

I went to modes > compact material editor to switch the material editor back to the compact editor.

Compact material editor

I then applied a UVW map modifier to the plane and selected Bitmap fit. I used the gizmo to move the image on the plane to get the image into the right position.

Next I duplicated the plane by holding shift and using the rotation tool. I then adjusted the image on the plane to show the side view of the head, I clicked the flip checkbox in the UVW map modifier to get the image facing the right way.

I positioned the planes so that they were close together but not overlapping. The bitmap image quality in viewports was not high enough so the reference plates were hard to see. I fixed this by going to Customise > Preferences > Viewports > Display Drivers > Configure Driver and then checking match bitmap as closely as possible.

This step was quite straight forward as it was the same way that we were taught to set up reference plates for tank model last year for 3d Modelling and Animation. I also used this method when modelling the objects for the James Bond animation I created.