here is a test image i have been working on.. in an earlier post i taked about my clothing problems... now i want to know how to make chrome for this bike, without exporting it to bryce. i can make the colored chrome and it looks pretty nice but i want to make silver chrome and need some ideas from yawl.. please help.. i am kinda new to this and this is still a test image so wall textures will be changed later..

You can fake chrome in Poser, but it's not great at this. You need a medium gray item color, a silvery texture map, a white or light gray highlight color, a light gray reflection color, and the silver reflection map that comes with P4. The results are not the best, but they are close.

umm that sounds like i need to find a few things.. any idea where i can get my hands on that good stuff.. :)

Which stuff? What paint program do you have? You can fake metallic colors on the template with some - and some (like Alien Skin's Eye Candy) have filters to add these in. In the Poser4 directory, there should be a Relection Maps directory with GoldRefl.pct and SilverRefl.pct. The color settings I listed are part of the Texture Editor in Poser.

i have photoshop and paint shop pro and bryce.. ok i understand now that i can use a reflection map. and i can use color settings in the texture editor... but i am unsure about what to do with a silver texture map. do i assign the silver texture to the parts i want chrome..? if i apply the silver texture map, why would i need to change the materials color...? i am still kinda learning about textures and maps and file types, its kinda overwelming if you never used anything like this before. so mucho thanks for the help.. it helped alot..

What you need to do to get a good looking chrome... and this works pretty good for bikes, is to set the material to no texture map, and use the silver tex map in the reflection map drop down.. to get different colors you just change the materials color... for example, the chrome on the bike can be a light gray with a black as the highlight, while the gas take and other bike pieces can be set to a red.. I have had much better results with chrome reflection maps when I changed them to grayscale first... take a look here: http://www.hunyes.com/pages/char14.html BioMeckanix Bikes are set up in this way and I have gotten pretty nice results with them, though not nearly as good as what you can get in Carrara..