Can use this to model against. Uses images in the Source Images Folder.
Can also find these in mayas own system viewer. Go to File, View Image..., Locate project, go to the Source Images Folder and should be able to see the image. Appears in pop up window. Gives you the dimensions of the file e.g. 803x803.
For reference, tend to use a NURBs surface. Allows to hide by surface type, very handy if using polygons to model. NURBs also have mapping, so bringing an image in will allow it to automatically be mapped to it.
Make sure Interactive Creation is turned on. Want to create a NURBs plane. To edit this, can go to makeNurbPlane1 in the attribute editor and change the width. Then once you have done that, adjust the Length Ratio. When Length Ration = 1.000 the object will be perectly square, therefore altering the width will alter the length perfectly.
Centre the plane in the world, slect all the translates in the channel box/layer editor, nurbsPlane1. change all translates to 0 = centred.
Top view first - easiest way to do this is to apply a material and then bring that bitmap into the material. go to the rendering tab 9located in the modelling shelf) and click on the one material which doesn't have a highlight, called lambert. Select the object, then select the material. Go to attribute editor, click on the materials tab. Then go to colour and click on the checked box. You can select file from this tab, click on the file browser and then select the image you want. A we are doing the top view, we are going to click on the top. Image is now on the plane. won't see the image until we go to the shading tab in the viewport window and select, hardware texturing to enable it.
As we already have the size. we can go ahead and duplicate the object. Rotate the object 90 degrees to get a different view. This will allow us to get a front view. Need to create another render node, so select lambert again and then change colour to file, select the next image file.
Can see one side shows up dark when all are in together. Can fix this by going into lighting and and turning on Two Sided Lighting.
Select All the object/images. Under layers (Bottom right of the screen), Create Layer from Selected. Click on the letter/empty box next to it until R shows up. Now can model against it without accidentally selecting it.