hi all! well, i had some time today to play with my spankin new Carrara 2.0 proggie! and as with any new program, i came across problems. one really has me going because i've been trying to figure this out for a few hours now. it has to do with transparency and texture maps. I am working with the basic materials in Poser 5 to illustrate my problem and they are listed below: 1. Standard P4 figure (possette) with no morphs. 2. P4 female biker shorts 3. custom texture and transparency maps for biker shorts---they produce an open hotpants What I do: 1. I load P4 female in Poser 5, load her standard biker shorts, then conform it to her. 2. I export the figure (Possette with shorts) as OBJ. 3. when the hierarchy tree shows up i choose the default selections (i.e. universe, figure 1, etc.). 4. when the OBJ menu pops up I check the "Include Polygon names in Group" (or something like that, the first box at the top), then OK...file saves. 5. I close poser then open Carrara 2.0 6. File---->New, then import OBJ. 7. When the options box pops up i use the default selections except for two modifications: I increase the "Smooth Factor" to 100% and click on "Use First Name as ID." 8. When figure loads i scroll down the HUGE list of figure parts and find the "Hip portion of the biker shorts," then click on it. 9. I go to the texture room then apply the texture and transparency maps, then render. 10. After rendering, maps don't work properly. Maps work fine when rendered in Poser 5. The colors i used to create the transparency map were black and white. Color black was to "cut out" the portions of the shorts i didn't want, and color white was used to "retain" portions i wanted to show. But when i apply the transparency its as if a different UV mapping is required and that different colors to "cut out and retain" figure parts are needed. I know my texture and trans maps are correct beause they render fine in Poser 5. i included a pic to further illustrate my problem. how would you do this process? maybe i'm just missing a step or two. the manual is absolutely no help. i looked through that book as if i was looking for a winning lottery ticket i misplaced. Btw, all settings used were default settings unless noted. Thanks very much for any advice anyone can give me...as always, i appreciate it very much. thanks for reading!! =)

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com/tutorial/grouper/index.html

thanks very much Patrick_210!! i appreciate the advice and especially for the illustration. it seems rather more complicated to use transmaps in carrara....in Poser 5 its just one click and drag a connection to the master shader and youre done! i wonder why it takes that many steps in carrara? :( thanks again! =)

Transparency in Carrara is an odd beast. The above can be changed to not be a multichannel mixer. Using just 'multi-channel' - 'color' is the texturemap of the butterfly - 'transparency' is the texturemap of the mask. For this to work properly though the places where they are completely transparent has to be black in BOTH the color and transparency map. This is what I find truely messed up with Carrara as you can't do the following. - 'color' completely white. - 'transparency' is a noise ranging from black to white. I was trying this to simulate clouds but just wouldn't work. You'd have to copy the same noise pattern in the transparency to the color channel to get complete transparency. Problem is that the color no longer is a pure white but shades of gray. Not really what I hoped for. Although seeing the above butterfly I might try again but this time using mutichannel mixer. Transparency shouldn't be this involved though IMO. :/ I asked what the incantations were happening under the hood that this was the case but Eovia never got back to me on that. Anyway, enough of my little rant. :)

i figured it out while playing with the proggie.....the reason why no matter what i did i couldnt get the transparency to work was because of one and only one thing---IN THE RENDER PROPERTIES THERE IS THIS OPTION CALLED "LIGHT THROUGH TRANSPARENCY" AND FOR SOME ODD REASON THAT IS BY DEFAULT UNCHECKED!! if light cant pass through then you cant see whats on the other side! you would figure that would be checked by DEFAULT cause what would be the point in using a transparency in the first place if light by default cant pass through??? this was a problem i tried to work out for days! and i discovered the solution by accident!! i tried all the advice you guys gave but the thing wouldnt become transparent!!!!!! anyway, i learned some things while playing around with the settings!! 1. CARRARA 2.0 RENDERING ABILITY IS BY FAR SUPERIOR TO FIREFLY!! you can still get a pretty good looking render with only a simple bulb and a figure with a lo-res texture!! it appears to me that the render engine enhances everything. 2. anti-aliasing of Poser 5 is better-----you can still see jagged edges even after setting anti-aliasing to BEST in Carrara. the same figure rendered in FireFly is more smoothed out. 3. i must have rendered 30 or so times in one session of Carrara with very high-quality render settings without the program hanging up, unlike in Poser 5 where after 5 renders the software hangs up. in both programs my actual computer didnt hang up. 4. adding a bump map or any bump to a figure is pretty complicated... this is my next problem...will figure out next. 5. did i mention the render engine in Carrara is way better than Poser 5? =)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=547974

Then I saw the trans map didn't include the rest of the color map, so you can see how it is included by painting white around the lashes.

Just showing and telling so I can contribute with some more in this subject, because I found it quite hard to grasp compared to other apps.

I copied the maineye in the color map, scaled it down and placed it over the UV for the eyeball.

This was the only material channel the UV map worked on.

I just increased the white, just a little to much here though, but this is how he is with some mascara.

The eyes are good enough for my purpose. I'm not going to have any close ups on this character.