Frame Types

Frame Types

Every object in a .4ds is a frame: a name, a transform, a parent, and a payload that depends on its type. The type is the Frame Type field in Properties ▸ Object ▸ 4DS Object Properties, and it is what the game tests when it looks a frame up by name.

Important

The frame type is not the kind of Blender object. A name the game looks for as a Dummy will never find a mesh, and the other way round. This is the most common reason a car or a character loads with a part missing and no message about it.

Frame type	Supported	What it is
Visual	✅	Something you can see — see the visual types below
Light	✅	The game's own light: two-value falloff, a pair of cone angles — see Lights
Camera	✅	A camera position
Sound	❌	Skipped on import — the engine stores nothing but a type byte and a parent
Sector	✅	A room the engine tests points against
Dummy	✅	A named box: a mount point, a marker, a script anchor
Target	✅	Links to other frames by name, bones included
User	✅	A frame with no payload
Model	✅	A frame with no payload
Joint	✅	A bone of a skinned character
Volume	✅	A frame with no payload
Occluder	✅	A closed volume that hides what is behind it
Scene	✅	A frame with no payload
Area	❌	Skipped on import, like Sound
Shadow	✅	A frame with no payload
Landscape	✅	A frame with no payload
Emitor	✅	A particle emitter: the mesh is the particle it spawns

Visual types

A Visual frame carries one of nine sub-types:

Visual type	What it is
Object	An ordinary mesh
Lit Object	A mesh with baked lighting the mission holds
Single Mesh	A skinned mesh — one per armature
Single Morph	A skinned mesh that also morphs
Morph	A mesh that blends between shapes
Billboard	A quad that turns to face the camera
Lens Flare	A stack of sprites drawn along a line
Mirror	A surface that reflects
Projector	A volume that paints a texture onto what is inside it — see Projectors

What the viewport draws

The add-on draws what the file describes but Blender shows nothing for — dummy boxes, mirror bounds and view boxes, projector volumes and the texture they paint, what a light reaches, each joint's influence box, and the frame an armature stands on. Every box carries a dot at its middle, and a box that does not sit on what it belongs to is joined to it by a dashed line, following Blender's own Relationship Lines overlay.

Objects are colored by what they are: sectors and occluders as wireframes, portals in violet, skinned meshes in pink.