JVRenderer's post a few threads below prompted me to clear up another misconception about Poser 4. You can easily have highlights with transparencies as long as you modify your textures a little. So, "What's the secret?", you might ask. No biggie, actually I first learned about it about 2-3 years ago from the early Digital Love Doll site. It's been mentioned in a few threads since but people tend to forget. The important thing to remember is to make the areas that will be transparent black BUT not only on your trans map but also on your texture! Now, granted for hair it might be a bit more tricky but if you start out on a black background when painting your hair you're all set! In the attached image, the swimsuit on the left has an oval-shape cut out at the midriff and highlight on the whole material is way up to the light greys at about 90% - no artifacts, no shiny stomach :)

And here's an example of what I mean, the texture for the swimsuit. The transmap is just a white fill with that same black oval. Hope this has helped some of you :)

That's a damn good tip, and one I would never have thought of in a million years. Many thanks for sharing.

Yes thank you very much! This is going to help me a lot.

Looks good and thanks for the tip, I'll be emailing myself this page!!

Ummm ... duh! Now I feel stupid! Thanks for the tip! :) BTW: Nice job on LaRoo. The default face scares me, but looking at yours, I may have to pick her up after all.

This is an excellent tip, I never actually noticed that some transmapped items don't get shiny when highlights are applied. The funny thing is that I still don't know WHY this trick works. ;) Thanks very much, take care. SnowS

Does it work in P5? I spent about 4 hours last night trying to figure out how to make hair "shine" last night and kept getting solid highlights in the hair...

The important thing to remember is to make the areas that will be transparent black BUT not only on your trans map but also on your texture! You missed a step. 'Apply texture to highlight' has to be checked, too. And there's a drawback, in that this doesn't work so well with black PVC with patterns, and such, because a nearly black texture with 'apply texture to highlights' will make the highlights go away for a lot of it. The trick to that is to make the texture in medium greys or even light greys, with black in the transparency areas, then use a very dark charcoal as the object colour, light or white highlights, and apply texture to highlights ticked. This way the object colour makes it dark, not the texture, and the object colour doesn't apply to the highlights, only the texture. - - - - - -

Now for a trick -- in Photoshop, (I don't know other paint programs, really) you can easily add the transparency to the texture. Simply open both (make them the same size ifthe arent' already), select all from the transparency, copy, and paste onto the texture. Set the layer to Multiply mode, flatten, and re-save. Viola. Works for hair, too. - - - - - -

ON a similar line, it's possible to get glowing bits in P4 (P5 it's easy because you can have an ambience map). It's not perfect with the shadows, but it's better than nothing B^) Try this: 1) Make a texture as normal. 2) Darken the texture using levels adjustment or whatever until the whole thing looks black but the histogram shows it's not quite. 3) Draw on some white spots. 4) Save it as a TIFF ir BMP. Don't save it as a GIF or it will proabbly just go black&white. Don't save it as a JPEG because the JPEG algorithm will look horrible in the tiny thin histogram of your image's main range. 5) Load it up as a texture. Set the ambient colour to something bright. 6) Render. Most of your picture should come out in vaguely normal tones (the gradiation of range won't be as even). The glowing bits will glow brightly.

*This is an excellent tip, I never actually noticed that some transmapped items don't get shiny when highlights are applied. The funny thing is that I still don't know WHY this trick works. ;)*

A lot of rendering engines (ever true ray-tracers like POV-Ray) have trouble applying highlights to anything that's 100% black. The sphere on the left has an RGB 0,0,0 texture map applied, the one on the left is RGB 32,32,32 - both have the same highlight settings. As dodger pointed out though, it's essential to have 'Apply texture to highlight' checked for this to occur.

Odd exception - while Poser won't hightlight a 100% black texture map, it will highlight an object with a 100% black material setting.

• Graham

Attached Link: http://host1.bondware.com/~syydr/download.ez?download_section_id=38

Great tips Dodger, thanks! I'm glad you all got some use out of it :) - now for some shiny cutout catsuits LOL! Crescent, you can pick up the faces I did at RDNA's Laroo Extras Free Stuff along with many others. She's probably the easiest figure to change with the morphs she already has, but I'm pretty sure more morphs will follow as will lots of support in general! I like the fact that you can give her lots of personality and not just be restricted to "cute".

Heh Crescent, I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't like the default LaRoo face. Actually it scared me so much that I said yuck and went away. However, this face looks pretty. I too may have to get her after all... sigh good bye my dear money...

A lot of rendering engines (ever true ray-tracers like POV-Ray) have trouble applying highlights to anything that's 100% black. Actually, what it is in this case is that when you 'apply texture to highlight' you're essentially using a specularity map, it's just that in P4 you can't use a different specularity map than your texture has. So, since you have black spots on the texture, and that texture is being used as a specularity map, those sections have a black highlight, which doesn't highlight. It can be hard to tell, though, because of the way highlights show up in Poser. In other words, basically, in P4 using 'apply testure to highlight' is the same thing as, in P5, using the same map for both diffuse colour, specular colour, and specular strength (though not having P5 I don't remember what those nodes are actualy called off the bat, so I'm using bastardised Max names)

bookmark. Oh wow, that is a good tip, must try that. :)

It's funny...I JUST discovered that very thing myself - by accident when I was creating a hair texture. I was coloring over a grayscale map used for the trans and said what the heck, I'll leave it. When I added highlights to the hair (hoping I could get a combination that would look right), I discovered I could turn the highlights way up and there was no ghosting in the transparent areas :o). Laurie

Looks gorgeous!!!!