Overview

4D Paint is a 32 bit windows based 3D texturing package for the PC. It has been designed to work directly with Kinetix's 3D Studio MAX package and Softimage NT. 4D Paint allows users to interactively position and paint directly on to the fully rendered surface of a 3D object built inside 3D Studio MAX or 3D Studio release 4 or Softimage NT.

Traditionally one of the hardest jobs involved with rendering was the texturing of surfaces. Simple surfaces have always been moderately easy to texture but when irregular surfaces are required the limitations of trying to assign a 2D bitmap to a complex 3D surface become apparent. The solution to this appeared some years ago on Silicon Graphics machines with 3D paint packages that provided the ability to paint on to a rendered surface and thus position texture correctly in relation to geometry. These packages were naturally only available to those with large budgets and fast machines to work from and until 4D Paint there was no package on the PC that could reproduce the features and speed of these packages. 4D Paint was developed by 4D Vision Asia with the intention of bringing the power of workstation 3D Painting to the PC at a price that's affordable.

Real Time Rendering

Want to see what you're painting as you paint it? Want to be able to position your object, fully rendered as you move it? Want to be able to paint a Bump Map and see it render as you paint it?

4D Paint renders Color, Bump and Self Illumination interactively both as you move the object and as you paint it. What's more, you don't need a multi-million dollar machine to do this. What do we mean when we say 'as you paint it'? Well, the bumps appear on the surface of the object you are painting as your paintbrush applies the 'bump' paint to it. The same applies to color and self illumination. There is no longer any need to wait for the screen to refresh after each brush stroke, no need to try and guess what your paint is going to look like when you're done, 4D Paint shows you what you're painting as you paint it.

Multiple Materials, Maps & Layers

4D Paint has features that give it the feel of a real paint package, it feels more like Photoshop than Windows Paintbrush in 3D. What do we mean? Well... Import multiple Materials applied to multiple objects. 4D Paint lets you paint over as many of these as you like with a single stroke.

For each Material you can paint on multiple Map Types, Color, Bump, Self Illumination, Opacity and Shininess. All of these Map Types are passed back to 3D Studio MAX when you have finished painting. For each Map Type you can create multiple Layers. Think of a Layer as a sheet of glass placed over the image you've painted. You can paint on that glass and the image changes but at any point in time you can remove the glass and the paint that used to be beneath it is still there. With this feature 4D Paint frees your creativity, allowing you to experiment with new textures as much as you like without fear of losing your previous work. And as with everything in 4D Paint this all happens in real time as you paint.

Modular Paint Tools

4D Paint's painting tools use a modular system of Brushes and Paints. What this means is that the tools you use take some of their settings from a 'Brush' and some from a 'Paint'. This means you can set up your favorite Paint (say Oil Paint) and paint that with any of the Brushes you have such as hard tipped brushes, large brushes, small brushes and more. This means that the number of possible painting effects goes up dramatically without increasing the amount of time you need to spend trying to produce them.Paint tools include: Brush, Line, Polygon, Fill and Clone.

Brush heads can be created in another package and loaded from disk or generated procedurally within 4D Paint. You can limit the amount of paint they carry, you can control exactly how far apart the dabs of paint they apply are placed.

Paints can be made to 'wash' in to the low areas of a bump map, they can be made dirty and more than 20 types of special effect paint are included such as procedural checkers, invert, desaturate, gradient. What's more these paints can paint multiple Map Types simultaneously, that is to say you can paint shiny, bumpy color on to the surface of an object with a single stroke and have it render as you paint.

Bitmap Paints

So you can paint color, bump, self illumination, shininess and opacity. What if you want to paint a complex texture such as Lizard Skin? Well, you could paint it manually, the paint tools 4D Paint's provides let you do that easily enough. But there is an even easier way.

Bitmap Paints are paints that use bitmaps as a source for the Map Types they apply. For example, you could get a Color Map of lizard skin, and a Bump Map, and include them in a Bitmap Paint. When you use the Bitmap Paint the Color and Bump from those maps will be applied to the object simultaneously. You can divide those Map Types up and spray sections of them one dab at a time, you can use the Texture Paint tool and paint freehand strokes of texture on to the object, you can even fill with them. And yes, you guessed it, all of this happens in real-time.

Cut And Paste

We could have done a simple cut and paste system that allowed you to cut, paste and position in 2D. Instead we went all the way and gave 4D Paint the ability to cut, paste, copy and move selected areas around in real-time. Yes, you can cut multiple map types simultaneously, paste them back on to the object and drag them around over the surface of the object interactively. As you drag them their color, bump and self illumination renders correctly based on the lights you have in the scene. They fold around the object at the same quality as all the paint. Imagine being able to paste a porthole on to the side of a ship and drag it around, bumps and all, until you were happy with its position.

4D Paint also cuts and pastes across applications so you can import an image from any other standard paint package and paste it on to the surface of your object, move it around until you're happy and drop it to any Layer you have assigned.

Text

What about text? Well, 4D Paint lets you enter Text and position it interactively on the surface of an object. It uses all your Windows fonts, so if you've got a logo that needs a precise font you can use it as easily as you could in a page layout package. What's more, the text is written using your currently selected Paint. So if you've got a bump paint selected your text will appear bumpy, if you've got a checkers paint selected it will appear checkered.

Bitmap Views, Working In 2D

Want to have a look at the 2D bitmaps that make up the texture you're painting? 4D Paint's 'Bitmap views' are 2D representations of the Layers you're painting in. For any Layer you can open a 2D view and paint in that too. While you paint in the 2D view the surface of the 3D object updates, there's no need to re-render it after you've painted in 2D.

If you're painting in a Layer that has transparency (one that allows you to see through to the image below) you can view that transparency value as checkers inside the Bitmap View so that you know where Paint has already been applied. 4D Paint also provides special effects paints specifically linked to the way these Layers work, hide areas of paint in a Layer then bring them back when you need them, paint with paints that only apply color where a stroke of paint has already been applied to that Layer.

If you need a precise positioning tool 4D Paint allows you to view the unfolded mesh of the object in wireframe over the 2D view you are painting in. As you paint, the paint is applied under the mesh and at any time the mesh can be removed leaving the original image intact. If you wish you can save the map you are painting with the mesh lines included to use as a positioning tool in another paint package. How long does this take? To give you an idea, on a P90 4D Paint applied the mesh of a 40,000 facet object to a flat bitmap in under 2 seconds.