Someone had written me that they had difficulty in trying to trace a dancing bear they had scanned. I will try to explain how a tracing is done. First, your image must be in a BMP format and in a program such as Windows Paintbrush. Open up EQ4 and you will see create a new project or open existing project. Open up new and give it a name. In this case, I named it bears. Open with new block, patch draw. Click block, import for tracing. Import your bmp. Click Patch Draw on the bottom and you will notice a little colored icon on the bottom of your tools menu. This icon hides and reveals your bitmap. You will need to use this box so I would experiment turning it on and off. Keep it on to trace.

Select the bezier tool. It's the one with the pencil and an arc and starting from the underneath portion of your bitmap, in this case, a back leg, (refer to picture on very top of this tutorial,) create arcs tracing the bmp and make sure the arcs are connected. To verify if they are, I click on color and fill. If they fill, they are connected. I also use the hide bmp icon and the magnifying glass. Use your bezier edit tool to make sure the arcs follow the bmp. That's the tool 4th from the top.

I then go back to draw and add the second leg and other portions that are under in the bmp. Click on the hide bmp icon to see your traced images and check on their connections. Hint: Whatever is traced first will always appear in order of tracing. Sometimes you might have to move a tracing because it interferes with editing nodes. Remember I said things that are traced 1st will appear in order. If you moved a leg to the side, traced something else, and moved the leg back, the leg will still be under the new tracing. To move, use the select tool. It's the top icon. I moved the arm as an example above. This arm when returned to match the bmp will always appear in the order it was traced. Refer to the picture previous to this one. There is a little patch under the head that should be behind the top of the dress. It is the chest area. I will move it and the arm to trace the dress top. This way any changes with the bezier edit tool will not interfere with the other nodes in the chest or the arm. I then added the skirt . The next addition is the arm. The final addition is the head and the feaures.

Things to remember:
Start with an object that is underneath everything else.
Use your edit tools to check curves.
Move objects if necessary to edit without inteference.
Use your magnifying glass and color tools to check for closed nodes. Nothing will fill properly if nodes are open. In case you forgot what nodes are, they are the dots that connect to each other.
If you traced something out of order put it to the side. When you want to place it in a different order, copy and paste to its proper destination. Delete the original.