Viewport and Overlays

Viewport and Overlays

A .4ds holds a great deal that Blender draws nothing for: the box a dummy stands for, the reach of a light, the volume a projector paints through, the box that decides which vertices a joint moves. The add-on draws all of it, and the 4DS Model sidebar tab (press N in the 3D view) is where it is turned on and off.

Important

Everything on this page is drawing only. Not one of these switches changes a single byte of what gets written, and none of them is saved into a .4ds.

Each box appears only while the scene holds something of its kind, so the tab stays short on a model that has no joints or no sectors.

The two switches almost every kind has

	What it does
Solid	Fills the shape's faces instead of drawing its twelve edges. The faces are shaded by a light the shape carries itself, so three brightnesses come out and the form reads, and they write depth, so the shape's own far edges stay behind it rather than showing through.
In Front	Draws it over whatever stands in front of it, so a box buried in the model can be seen whole.

They are set per kind, not once for everything, so a filled mirror box can sit beside wireframe joint boxes.

Joints

	What it does
Joint Size	How large the joint markers are drawn.
Influence Boxes	Draws each joint's influence box, plus In Front and Solid.
Handles: Resize, Move, Turn	Which handles appear on a selected joint's influence box - six faces to resize, three arrows to slide, three rings to turn. Three switches, each on its own, all starting on.
Skeleton	A solid light-blue line from each joint to the one it hangs off, with a dot on each joint's own middle. Without it a character reads as a cloud of markers with nothing saying which hangs off which. Joint Links In Front draws them through the mesh they move.

Note

The handles on a selected joint belong to its influence box, not to the joint. Move the joint itself with Blender's own G, R and S.

Dummy Boxes

In Front and Solid. Every dummy's box is outlined from the moment the dummy is made, including the ones whose box happens to match the cube Blender already draws - so there is always something to take hold of and drag.

Sectors

A pair each for Sector and Portal - In Front and Solid. See Sectors and Portals for what the colors mean and why a filled portal does not fight the wall it lies in.

Mirrors

	What it does
View Box In Front, Solid	The view box drawn over the model, and filled.
What It Reflects	Outlines what the mirror would reflect in game, by the game's own two tests. See Other Frame Types.

Projectors

	What it does
Project Textures	Paints the projector onto the surfaces it covers, with the volume shape, the UV mapping, the falloff and the blend its mode asks for. See Projectors.
Solid	Fills the volume's faces - the box, or the pyramid inside it.

A projector's volume is outlined in yellow, a color nothing else here uses: it used to be drawn in black, which is what Blender draws an unselected object in, so it disappeared among every other outline in the scene.

Lights

Solid fills what a light reaches: a point light's two ranges as balls, a spot's two cones as cones. The kinds that set a sector's atmosphere fill as nothing, because their numbers are not distances from the light at all - see Lights.

What the colors mean

Color	What it is
Orange	the frame a mesh stands on
Green	a joint's influence box
Light blue	the lines joining a joint to the one it hangs off
Deeper blue	a dummy's box
Teal and pink	a mirror's authored bound and its view box
Yellow	a projector's volume
Cyan	a sector
Purple	a portal
Pink	a skinned mesh

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, which follows Blender's own Relationship Lines overlay.

If nothing is drawn at all

• The whole overlay follows Blender's Show Overlays button, in the 3D view's header.
• A filled shape's color only shows while the viewport colors objects by object; filling a sector or a portal asks the viewport for that once.
• Nothing is drawn for an object that is hidden, or in a collection that is excluded.