I would have posted this in the BodyPaint forum but there doesn't appear to be one. Hopefully there will be soon. But it's not strictly off topic since I bought the program to paint the models I'm starting to make for Poser. Anyway, I just got the program and I'm trying to work through the tutorial. I'm suppose to create a new material. Done. Then I'm suppose to drag the material I just created on to the object, but it won't let me do that. I've read the instructions numerous times and I'd watched the video several times and I think I'm doing what they are. In the material manager I click on the little square that represents the color channel, then I drag over to the left to the first icon in that row. But it gives me a circle with a line through it (or was that an x). That row (left wall bricks) has a blue pencil next to it so it should be editable. So what am I missing. I also noticed that I can't drag any of the textures in the other rows to the first icon in their respective rows either. Is that not the right place to drag? It sure looks like what they're doing in the video. I've given up in frustration right now. But I'll be trying again later today. It's always like this when you get a new program. Thanks.

I think (don't have time right now to run through the tutorial) you need to drag the material "ball" rather than the color channel onto the leftwallbricks object. I don't think I've ever tried dragging one of the channels onto something.

Although there isn't a 'BodyPaint' forum, you should try the 'Cinema 4D' forum as they are both Maxon products and BodyPaint is an integratable module in Cinema 4D. Are you dragging the material icon from the Material Manager window onto the object name in the Object Manager? This is how you do it in Cinema 4D. BP should then automatically create a 'Texture' tag to the right of the object.

Thanks. I'll post there in the future. No. I watched the video and then followed the printed instructions. It looked to me like they were dragging the color channel onto the material "ball" in the video, but maybe they changed panels on me and I didn't notice. But reading in the manual seems to indicate that I need to do what you're saying. I'll try that. Thanks.

BodyPaint has the steepest learning curve of any program I have tried (well, maybe ZBrush is steeper...). The problem is getting the workflow right. What you need to do is: 1) create your model - say, a simple cube. 2) collapse it (i.e. reduce it to polygons - primitives don't work properly, with a cube primitive you end up painting all six sides simultaneously. You can't prevent that unless you UV map the object, and you can't do that unless it's polygons. BP calls this making the object editable.). 3) create a material and drag the material 'ball' onto the object in the object manager. 4) open the material and create at least one texture. In the color channel, for example, you would click the arrow next to the 'Texture' label and then 'Create new texture'. You can adjust the name, size, etc. from the dialog. By default BP makes the texture have a dark grey background, so your object will immediately turn dark grey. 5) Now you could map your object. In this case, select the cube in the object manager, choose the 'UV polygon edit' tool, and then from the UV Mapping tab in the attributes manager, choose 'Projection' and then 'Box' projection. 6) Finally, paint your object. You can create other textures at any time and paint them too, either simultaneously (great for painting bump maps and color maps at the same time) or independently.

Thanks for the help. I got through that part of the tutorial. I've wanted a program like this for a long time. I'm glad I finally took the plunge.