I recently got Anton's Majik FX for poser, and it all worked perfectly until I tried to render. When I render, I don't et the wonderful little sparkles that daz shows on their page, I get small squares on color on each of the planes (x, y, and z) shere the sparkle should be. Any help would be LOTS appreciated. I a bit of a beginner, so this may be a stuid question, but I've got to learn somehow!

Are you using the MAT poses that come with it? They're in the poses library and they set up the colour and transparency options. What version of Poser are you using? Can you post a render here in this thread? It's easier to spot the problem if we can see the problem for ourselves.

They should work "out of the box" on Poser 4. Poser 5 may need tweaking in the Material room, though I thought that mainly was bump maps. Poser 3 won't work at all - the intersecting squares are made semi-transparent to create the effects and tarnsparency was new in Poser 4. DAZ do offer refunds within 28 days of purchase if you find you can't use the package at all.

If it's Poser 5, this is what to do. Go into the material room, and select the particles. Adjust the Ambience of each piece (ie; magic dust1, magic dust2 etc) to 1, it is set to 0 by default in P5. Then your particles will have their glow.

YAAAAY!!! I figured it out. when I turned down the "transparency falloff" it worked! thanx!

Hmmmm....sounds like you don't have any of the P5 patches, since they fix the trans falloff problem. You might want to download and install the SR3 patch.

that sounds WONDERFUL!!! Where is it that I could find these patches? Are they at the official website? How many other renders will this effect? Thanx for any more info!

You can download them from the official Curious Labs website, yes: www.curiouslabs.com. They're up to Service Release 3 now, and people are still reporting problems. I'm on 2.3 and haven't had time to install 3 yet, but I know a few people have said they'd rather go back to 2.3. Each patch seems to introduce a few new problems as well as fixing old ones, but the transparency falloff was fixed in one of the earliest patches. It could affect a lot of your documents. There were some changes in how lighting is handled and I had to redo lighting in a few documents after one of the patches. My personal experience has been that each patch makes the application work better overall, with faster renders and fewer crashes. Not everyone would agree with me on that, though.

BTW, check the DAZ freebie archive. I put out a free add-on for these figures. You might find it useful.

Another tip: set the Ambient color to 1 and connect the Transmap to the Diffuse Color node as well. That will give you much stronger colors. Other option: copy the ambient color to the Diffuse color and leave everything else as it is. I remember that I was really disappointed as I wanted to render Majik the first time in P5 after it looked so cool in ProPack.