Experimenting with skin translucency. The texture is a skin tone with volume and transparent color to blood red. Texture is given about 25 transparency. I put a poser skeleton head inside to block some light. It needs a lot more work. The only places on the body that would really let light through are the ears, nostrils (at certain angles of light) perhaps the lips and the fingers if placed in front of a very strong light. Poser heads unfortunately are all one piece but if I could find a figure with the ears and nose as seperate meshes it would be easier. Perhaps a transparency map would work but take some work to achieve. The picture above shows the sun (light) behind the head and shining though the ears like in real life. hopefully this will give some people some ideas to work on.

Attached Link: http://www.worley.com/G2/g2_scatter.html#startit

You need to render using blurry transmissions. It is often referred to as "sub surface scattering," or "SSS." This will create a matte look if you uo the specular halo color to almost full white. You can see an example of this technique using worley lab's G2 render plugin for lightwave at the link above.

Attached Link: http://www.worley.com/G2/g2_skin.html#startit

and here...

Attached Link: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/subsurface/

here's the technical explanation.

You can use Poser to create ears and nose as separate meshes by using the grouping tool. Then exporting them into Bryce. You can also do the opposite and create a prop figure without a nose and ears also using the grouping tool. As an alternative, if you exported your Poser figure to 3D Studio or possibly some other 3D package, you can detach the ears and nose or for that matter, any other body part into separate objects and re-import into Bryce for texturing.

Thanks madmax but I was aware of subsurface scattering. Might be another experiment to work on in Bryce. All I was trying to do here was to get light to pass through the ear so that the blood red shows through like in real life. Thanks Quest, I haven't worked much in Poser and had forgotten about that and of course could pull it into 3DSMax too.

Aldaron, you might try with the texture. Like, create a transparency map where everything is white except the ears and the nose which would be darkish grey. Of course, you'd need to experiment with the actual tone of grey and whether the technique works at all. I'm certain that separate ears and nose will need smudging and blurring in Photoshop. Or that you'd need to remap the whole figure.

Oh, now read your post more carefully and saw that you mention transparency mapping... Anyway, try this: Copy your figure into 3DS and remove ears and nose. Import the original figure, apply the translucency. Import the second head into the same coordinates, check Solid when Boolean rendering. Make it smaller by 0.5% or even less - 99,5 or 99,7 % in all three directions. Yes, you can enter decimal values. You'll get (at least in theory) subsurface scattering. The only problem is that the second head will have to have either flat colour texture or you'll have to remap it if you want the Poser texture, as the mapping will certainly be off.

I know you can get an ear in .3ds or .obj at TurboSquid. You've got to join but thay have some amazing free models. All you got to do is advanced search and enter free as the word you're looking for and ear come to that. Hope this helps. Cat

Errr... I know this may be a whole lot of work, but why not try making a UV map that controls the transparancy channel? But that's my crazy way of thinking.