Background images have their use in Blender when guiding your modeling or animation process, but they have their limitations as well. In particular, you're not able to stretch or rotate your image. Christopher Yonge uses the 'Images as Planes' add-on as an alternative and shows you how to use it in this video he created for his animation class in University of California at Santa Cruz.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzgHjy77ovc
About his classes, Chris says:
University of California at Santa Cruz offers digital modeling and animation classes for registered students 3-4 times a year. The digital modeling classes average 180 students per quarter, the animation class around 50. Blender has been used since they were started three years ago and has proved ideal for teaching and production.
2 Comments
Adds the missing piece of functionality that Image-Empties lack, and that is a fully time-line integrated movie clip as a reference image. Good for quick rotoscoping setups.
This must be a standard IMO. The only one thing I'm not happy here is a bad mixing of semi-transparent images on planes. GLSL is a weak part of Blender, sadly.