I’m having a problem using reference pics within Wings3D. I’ve looked in the manual and searched the forums but can’t seem to find a solution, so I turn to the experts here. 
I work on more than one machine (I like to sneak in practice whenever I find the time) so I shuttle files across 2 (sometimes 3) computers so that I can work whenever the opportunity arises.
I’m trying to get a setup where I can use reference pics (brought in as image planes) but I can’t seem to find any way to get the images to work consistently. When I open the file on another computer, the image planes are blank.
I’m not fond of leaving the images internal - as then each time I save (save incremental) the file is exceedingly large as it has to save the images each time.
I’d experimented with ‘Make External’ saving the generated images to the same folder as the *.wings file. This gets the file sizes down. My problem then is that the path to the image seems to be absolute - when moving to another machine, if the directory doesn’t have the exact same directory structure (or even if I rename the directory on the same machine and open the file later) the images fail to load. I had assumed the program would work like other programs that can link to external files and look for linked files in the current directory when it can’t find the target, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I’d even deal with the over inflated files with leaving the images internally … but even that doesn’t seem to completely work flawlessly. For example: I made a setup with multiple image planes (top, front, side, head_front, head_side). Even leaving them all internal, when I open it on a different machine only 3 of the 5 show up. If I re-create the directory structure of the first machine onto the second, then they all show up. (And they all were internal - I double checked in the Outliner)
This seems to imply that I would have to have a common image path on every computer (ex. ‘c:\refpics\blahblahblah’) so that when I open the model on another computer it will continue to load. Apparently it looks for files in an absolute way ‘c:\refpics\blahblahblah\front.tga’ as opposed to relative ‘./front.tga’ - is this really the case. This must cause problems moving files (with links) across platforms as it’s not like you can create a ‘c:\foo’ on a *nix box.
Am I doing something wrong here … or do I just have to resign myself to setting aside a special directory on every machine where I want to work where I know the path for images can remain consistent?
thanks for any help anyone can give