Image Plane Camera

When working in Maya with Image Planes you may notice the performance start to lag when moving the camera around your scene. This is a breakdown of how to create a seperate camera for a side view image plane which will speed up your performance as you work out of a different camera than your image plane resides. You can use the same method for creating image plane cameras in any viewport.

1) In the side viewport, select "Panels > Orthographic > New > Side".

2) Rename that camera orthoSide.

3) Use the panel pulldown "View > Image Plane > Import Image".

4) Select the image you wish to use for your side view.

5) Create a layer called "Cameras": In the layers panel, click the button marked "Create a new layer". Double click the layer name (layer#) to open the "Edit Layer" window and change the Name to "Cameras".

6) Select your new orthoSide camera and assign it to that new layer by Right-Clicking the layer name and selecting "Add Selected Objects" from the popup.

7) Change the display type on this layer to Reference by clicking the center box next to the layer name repeatedly until you see a "R" appear in the box. By clicking the first box with a "V" in it you can toggle the visibility of your image planes.

8) Use the panel pulldown "Panels > Orthographic > Side" to switch back to your default camera for modeling.

The reason for steps 5-7 is so that while you are modeling you can marque select without constantly selecting your image plane and camera by accident. This should improve your viewport performance with large image plane files.

Alternatively you can download a script I have written to do this entire set-up automatically. The script can be found on my MEL Scripts page or at Highend3D.com as "mh_imagePlaneCamera".