Welcome to 4D Paint Version 1.6! This window is designed to provide you with handy tips when you open the application. You can turn them off by selecting the 'Tip Of The Day' entry in the Help Menu and deselecting the 'Show tips at startup' check box. If you're already fed up with them you can deselect it now and this window will not appear next time you start the application. If you're a beginner it may help you to leave this window active, you never know what could come in handy!


Before you can paint a Map Type such as bump, you need to have a paintable Layer for it. Although you may see a 'Render Layer' map entry in the Map Types box of the Layers Dialogue this is not a paintable Layer, it is used by the renderer as a compacted version of the Layers you paint. To make a Layer for painting press the 'New' button.

If either MAX or 4D Paint exits abruptly (eg. crashes) you may need to restart both in order to get them working. In this case make sure you save either the MAX file you were working on or the .4dp file to recover later.

Bitmap Paints over-ride the Brush Head. This means that it doesn't matter what type of Brush Head you have, the Bitmap sprayed by the Bitmap Paint will be shaped by its own alpha channel or tile size. However, Brush Dab Spacing and Number of Dabs DO affect the Bitmap Paint, try setting dab spacing to Automatic and the tiles of the Bitmap Paint will be painted with their edges flush to each other.

Problems with MAX mapping in 4D Paint? If you've used Max's automatic 'Generate Mapping Coordinates' try increasing the number of segments before you paint. If you paint and can't see any paint being applied try pressing F5 to redraw the screen. Or try mapping it using the UVW Map modifier.

Keeping the Info Window visible allows you to see and change the Foreground and Background colours as well as the intensity of Bump, Shininess, Self Illumination and Opacity.

Try setting up bookmarks for points of view that you use frequently in a scene. The default bookmarks are the same as their equivalently named viewports in MAX but you can add your own storing position, scale, rotation and the position of the lights when you create the bookmark.

4D Paint is optimised for 24-bit colour depth. You may well find that it renders faster at this depth that 16-bit.

To create a new Brush or Paint, open an existing one, edit its name and settings and click 'Put To Scene'. As soon as you click that it is written to the list. Click 'OK'. When you quit 4D Paint the Brushes.dat and Paints.dat files are updated with your new Brushes and/or Paints.

Want to have an object in the scene but stop it from being painted on? Freeze that object using the Objects window. Select the object from the list of objects in the scene and press the 'Freeze' button.

The 4D Paint project file stores all the settings you have in the project you saved. That includes custom colours, the size and position of the window and lighting settings among others.

When you cut a selection set from the Base Layer of a colour map, the Background Colour appears in the hole left behind.

The Fill Tool will fill with any Paint Type. If you want to Blur an entire image select a Blur Paint and Fill the image with it. Similarly the Fill Tool respects the intensity of your Paint as selected from the Colour Picker.

When 4D Paint generates a Base Bump Layer, it fills it with Grey 128 so that you can paint UP Bump with a bump value higher than 128 and DOWN Bump with a value of less than 128. To see your Bump more clearly, turn your Spotlight to full, Ambient light ruins the illusion of Bump.

When you use the Texture Paint tool the source for the Texture Paint operation defaults to the centre of the Bitmap Paint you are using as a source.

If you have a pressure sensitive graphics tablet plugged in to your system and working, the mouse will not paint unless you switch off pressure sensitivity (Tools/Preferences/Pressure Sensitivity).

When you Fill with a Bitmap Paint the 'Auto Dab Spacing' option is automatically turned on. That means that if you fill with a tiling texture it will fill with edges flush to one another and tile perfectly!

The larger the bitmaps in a scene the more memory 4D Paint has to use, similarly the more Layers the more memory. If you find you are running short of memory try compacting the Layers.

You can cut and paste across applications! If you cut a colour map you can paste it in to any clipboard compliant paint package, and what's better, you can paste it back in to 4D Paint afterwards.

Want to see multiple layers on top of each other in 2D? Open the Render Layer for that Map type by double clicking its entry in the Layers List then single click the Layer you wish to paint in. Now paint in the 2D view opened by the Render Layer, the Paint you apply will be updated in there and it will appear correctly underneath Layers above it and over Layers beneath it.

If you want to make new Brush Head bitmaps make sure that you save them in Greyscale .bmp format. Some packages allow you to save them in 'indexed colour' as 8 bit images, this will not work properly.

Try setting up your own most used Brushes and Paints so that you don't need to keep editing them. It's tempting to treat 4D Paint like Photoshop and just use the defaults, but  the multiple Brush and Paint feature can speed up work and make doing things in general easier. The next tip tells you how...

If you're building a Bitmap Paint with Colour and Bump try to resist the temptation to put shadows in the Colour Map where the bumps would cause them, the Bump Map will generate these shadows for you on the surface of the object.

You can also cut and paste multiple map type floater objects between instances of 4D Paint.

Short on memory? If you've cut or copied a large image use the 'Clear' option from the Edit Menu to remove it from the clipboard to free some memory up.

No inspiration?, get some good kashmir and roll yourself a joint!

Try using a SpaceWare compatible device for positioning your objects in 3D using an input device that provides 6 degrees of freedom!

Want to show someone what you've been doing? Position your object, light it nicely, set the background to white (to avoid ink wastage) and press Print, the 3D view of the object will be printed for you.

If you want to paint shininess or opacity on the 3D object and want to be able to see where they are applied try this. Generate a new paint that paints shininess/opacity and colour. Add a new colour layer. Paint with the paint and the colour will let you know where you applied it. Then delete the colour Layer, leaving the shininess/opacity behind!

For your information, 4D Paint supports as many materials as you import, 5 map types per material, 20 layers per map type and 2 bitmaps per layer (Paint and Alpha). This means that even a single Material has the potential to require 200 bitmaps open in memory at any time.