Create a Rule of Thirds overlay in Blender
Posted on 21. May, 2009 by Andrew Price in Tutorials
Most professional cameras these days come with a built-in ‘Rule of Thirds‘ function that overlays a 3×3 grid over the viewfinder. This allows photographers to quickly and easily line up their shots for optimal composition. So why not set up blender to do the same?
To start, you will need to save the following image to your hard drive:
(click for big)
In the bottom left hand corner of your 3d view, click View>Background Image.
This will open a dialogue box. Click the single button that says Use Background Image. Then click the Load button that appears.
Navigate through the folders and select the image that you saved earlier to your hard drive.
Finally drag the Blend slider to 0.00 and hit the Premul button. This will enable the alpha channel in the PNG we loaded.
Close the Background Image box and you’re done!
If we flick to our camera view (Numpad 0) we can see that the 3×3 red grid is now overlaying our viewport. How easy is that?
The lines will blur slightly depending on how far zoomed out you are, but the basic outlines are there. The best part is, if you change the resolution, the overlay will shrink and stretch to fit, meaning you will always have optimal composition no matter what size ratio you choose!
Remember: If you want blender to load these settings upon start, press Ctrl + U.
I hope you get some benefit this quick blender tip! You might also like to try overlaying the Golden Mean, (an alternative to the rule of thirds). Many believe that the Golden Mean is the perfect dimension ratio to add energy and motion to your picture. More on that here.
6 Responses to “Create a Rule of Thirds overlay in Blender”
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Blendipel
21. May, 2009
Nice tip.
One problem: If you have a ground plane or anything similar to that in your scene, you don’t see any background -> no lines.
Nismo
21. May, 2009
Blendipel, you could always put it in wireframe mode.
Blendipel
03. Jun, 2009
True, although you often don’t see much of your scene in Wireframe-Mode because nearly everything’s black then. But with hiding and layers and this stuff, it should somehow be possible.
theSizzler
11. Jun, 2009
Well, as Blendipel points out, this is actually an UNDERlay, not an overlay. It can still be useful, however.
elio
23. Jul, 2009
A very interesting article about the same topic … http://jakegarn.com/the-rule-of-thirds/
Mike O
04. Nov, 2009
If you’ve got any modeled environment in your scene, the underlay gets obscured pretty easily. I’ve figured out a very sloppy way to make an overlay. After using your method, you can use grease pencil and trace your underlay. It’ll look crude, but it’ll stay on top of everything, and it’ll function fine as a guide.