Sorry but presently at work so I don't have access to 3DCoat. I'll ty to explain this as best I can.
In the older versions of 3DC in the paint room you could place a texture in the form of a jpg onto the screen and using a white color and brush, paint the image of the jpg onto the surface of your model. For example I could use a photo of a brick wall and paint it onto the wall of a model of a building.
When initially pulling the jpg over from your desktop onto the paint room you are prompted, what do you want to use the image for stencil, alpha, smart material, etc. I always selected smart material. And it worked perfectly.
Last night I tried this several times and I did select smart materia but using a white brush, it did not seem to work. It appears you must save the smart material to your smart material collection, but even doing that, it failed to work.
What has changed or what am I doing wrong? Using ver 4.7 64 bit...