I get an occasional problem of transparency not working when using the P4 rendering mode in P5. I usually use the P4 rendering with ignore shader trees when im doing a preview rend because its faster, but sometimes materials i use trans on simply wont show up at all. If I uncheck the ignore shaders it shows up. What doesnt make sense is that sometimes the same trans will work on a dfferent character with the same mat and render settings. For example.. I was working on a character today and the lashes weren't showing up with shader trees off, but I pulled up another character with the exact same trans and it worked. I even tried copying and pasting the material windows but it still didnt work. It just makes no sense to me. Does anyone know what could cause this?

I have a suspicion that Poser (4 & 5) does not reset everything when you load a new file. So I normally shut down poser and restart it before loading a new scene. In fact, now I mention it, I wonder if that's why I don't seem to get as many problems as some other users in this forum.

It's definately not that.. this is a problem i've had every since i went from p4 to p5 several months back and its happened many times on my first scene after starting poser fresh. When I say it happens occasionaly, I mean that it happens on some scenes and others it doesnt, not that it happens sometimes on a single scene. If a pz3 or cr2 gets this problem it it will allways have this problem everytime i load it and vice versa. I've been using poser for a couple of yrs now and never experienced this problem til P5 and its driving me nuts becuase I can't find any pattern or make any sense out of it.

Poser 5 does not always read legacy files (cr2s pz3s MAT poses made on P4 or earlier versions) the same way as it's predecessors because the P5 rendering engine is completely different. Poser 5 doesn't use MIN and MAX settings for transparancy like P4 did, but instead has a more robust system using Transparancy and Transparancy_Edge which are slightly different. Sometimes you will need to manually set both Transparancy and Transparancy_Edge to 1.0 for the transparancy map to work the same. In other cases, if this does not do the trick, you may need to apply a very small displacement (0.001) to the object - but you need to provide some kind of color or image input to the displacement node to get it to work (I usually connect the node to my texture map or trans map). You also need to be sure that "use displacement" is set in your render options.