Hi.. a while ago I downloaded UV Mapper at the advice of someone who mentioned it was good for making transparency maps for any .OBJ file including poser clothing. The only thing is, the type of transmap I want to work with is the simple, two-dimensional kind where there are no vertices, sections, or grids. You know, just one gigantic all-white area for what you see, and the rest solid black for what you don't see. Is it possible to create THAT sort of transparency map model with UV Mapper or any other program? I've toyed with it and read the instructions for ages and I can't get it to do that. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

All you need to make a transparency map is a paint package. UVMapper can be used to generate a template of the object you wish to apply the transmap to. For example, a box object will have a totally different template from (for example) V3. Use the template as your guide, then draw your black and white bits in the appropriate areas.

DAZ has free templates for their products, if it didn't come with the installer, you can find them at the bottom of the product's page. In freestuff, Snowsultan has posted many seam guides that may help also.

I use any paint program that will output JPG or BMP files. If I'm reading you right; you want to make something like a view port. one way to do this would be to create your scene including whatever animation you wanted and then put a "Square" primitive object between the camera and the scene. Next I would open a paint program and ensure the blank canvass was white. With in the white workarea I would draw and fill a black circle. I'd save that file and then I would set the transparency map for the "Square" to reference my newly created "JPG" file. I would also set the transparencydial to 100%. when you render you will see the affect. This is a different appraoch than was already discussed but it sounds closer to what you're looking for.

Okay I should have made my question clearer. I already know how to work with existing transmaps with a paint program, as I do this all the time. But I'm talking about how to create a brand new transmap for an .OBJ that doesn't already have one of any kind to start with. Specifically, clothing items not from DAZ that don't come with any. I can get UV Mapper to create templates from the object files, but the problem is that those templates have all sorts of criss-crossing gridlines and seams all over them, which makes them impossible to work with in a paint application unless I want to spend 400 hours flood-filling each and every tiny little square of space created by those intersecting gridlines. I will try to upload examples here of two different transmaps Little Dragon once posted for the same item, to give a better picture of what I mean. See below.

This is the kind of template typically generated by UV Mapper. Completely impossible to work with unless I want to individually edit each of those tiny little squares. See below.

And THIS is what I want instead. Same clothing object, but it's all white instead of grid-patterened. THIS is what I can't get UV Mapper to produce. And the only way I'm able to turn the first one into the second one with a paint program, is to select flood-fill and then click on each one of those little grid squares and turn them white, one by one. A laborious procedure to say the least. So, is there any way around that which produces the second picture instantly?

What paint program are you using? I'm not sure about the others, but Photoshop has a great selection tool called the magic wand. If it were me, I'd click on the black background area outside your transmap with the magic wand selection tool. Then convert that to green or some other unique color. Then use the magic wand again, this time usig the select by color feature and select all of the black in the picture.. in this case since everything outside your transmap is now green all that is left should be the black spaces inside your figure. Once you have them selected, fill with white. Once that is accomplished I'd then select the green area and convert it back to black.

I'd do it slightly different, but the principle is the same. Using Photoshop: 1. Select the black area with the magic wand. 2. Create a new layer and ensure you have it selected in the layers palette. 3. Select "Inverse" from the select menu. 4. Flood fill in white. 5. Deselect. 6. Select outside the white area. 7. Flood fill in black.

Why do you want to fill the whole map with white? If everything is going to be equally opaque you don't need a transmap at all. If you want to be selective, assuming your paint program supports layers, copy the grid to a new layer and set the blending mode to multiply, then clear and paint on the background - the black will be opaque but the white will show through as you work, and you can hide the grid layer from time to time to check progress. You should have some sort of polygon lasso tool, so if you need to flood fill a large area click around with that using the grid as a guide (you don't have to follow the inner lines if you don't want to). When the texture is done hide/delete the grid layer and save as jpg.

In paint shop pro make the picture 16 colours. pick a colour and make it the background colour using fill. go to edit palette and change the black colour to white. Then change the background colour to black and make the screen 2 colours to get rid of the extra palette colours and then you have your map. Change the amount of colours to the amount you want to use I usually just use 256 colours for transparency maps.

Thanks for your further replies everyone, they've been quite helpful. I am in fact using Paint Shop Pro and have succeeded in getting the desired results by using the methods suggested above. So to be clear then, paint program image manipulation is the only way to get that non-gridded transmap template, and I shouldn't bother trying to get UV Mapper to output the file that way initially, correct? Also, a slightly off-topic yet related question. In Paint Shop Pro, is there no way to use the kind of flood-fill that was common in older paint programs? The kind where it fills with the color but automatically stops as soon as it hits any other differently colored pixel? So that if I had an empty white rectangle with a black border, and I filled inside it, it would only fill to the border and then stop by itself? That used to be very easy to do and still is in simple apllications like MS Paint, but I see no way to do it with PSPro. You can select a limited area to be affected by a fill, but that's useless if your desired area is of a weird or unorthodox shape. Any tips? Thanks again!

If you want the fill to work like an older type then in the control palette type 0 in the tolerance box. Usually with the tolerance it should be a low number or It fills too much of the screen. I usually make it no more than twenty. I hope this helps...