(1) Why don't M3 and V3 have eye lashes (even though I have morph controls for them?)(I have Vince for M3 and he has eye lashes.)

(2) When I put (and conform) some clothing on V3, sometimes her skin shows through the clothing -- it's not a perfect fit (this is with V3 clothing).

(3) When I have V3 do a walk pattern, her legs go through her skirts -- I thought this clothing was supposed to move with the bodies :o/

(4) What are the V3 and M3 blank images for? (When I click on them, an image appears that doesn't look blank.)

(5) If I make body parts invisible under clothing, will my stuff render faster?

Thanks for your help and patience.

1. They do have eyelashes, but these are set to transparent when you load them right out of the figures library. You need to apply a trans map to them before they become visible in render. 2. Most clothing will experience some "poke through" when the figure is posed. This also happens if you morph the figure, for example if you give Victoria big boobs. You can either hide the body part, fix it in postwork, or render with the body part visible and then invisible, and use a technique called snowcloning to put the two together (tutorial here in the Tuts section.) I'll let someone else handle the other questions :)

Thanks! Very helpful! One more question: (sorry for my ignorance) What is a "trans map"?

A trans map is a transparency map. It is a picture usually black and white with shades of grey that makes the object or figure it is applied to seem to have holes or in this case actual eyelashes.

1. This may depend on the skirt you're using, if it isn't just normal "poke through" (see question 2). Can you tell us what clothing you're using, maybe even post a screen shot? 4) The "blank" figures are for use by clothing makers (we think). They have no morph channels so they're lighter, but not much use for normal Poser-ing. 5) I don't think so, no. But it will help to avoid poke through.

More on trans maps: Poser will render the black areas in the trans map as transparent and the white as opaque. Shades of grey in between will render as semi-transparent. It is usually used for eyelashes, hair and clothes with transparent parts (lace etc). A trans map is easy to make in a picture editing software (PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro etc) by just turning a normal image of e.g. lace into a greyscale image.

Thanks for the help and support.

I thought I had read somewhere that invisible things render faster. Oh well...

How does one "apply" a trans map? (Is there a step-by-step tutorial somewhere?) Why does Vince (African American male for M3) have a trans map in place but V3 and M3 don't? Do M3 and V3 have trans maps that can be purchased? (Or do they come with trans maps and I just don't know where they are?) As you can tell, I am a true novice to DAZ models...

The clothing I have been having trouble with are the V3 Morphing Cocktail and V3 Morphing Starlett dresses. I am an animator and I want my models to do things like walk and look normal, and yet when I have V3 walk in these dresses, her legs pop through the dress material constantly.

How does one "apply" a trans map? (Assuming Poser 4) In the surface materials dialogue, select the material you want (eyelashes for instance); load the transmap in the transparency map box; set both transparency sliders to 100%; make sure the reflective color is black. > Why does Vince (African American male for M3) have a trans map in place but V3 and M3 don't? Because he's a third party character, the artist has made a transmap for him. > Do M3 and V3 have trans maps that can be purchased? Yes, you can also download them free; most texture sets have a lash transmap with them, and they can be interchanged freely. > The clothing I have been having trouble with are the V3 Morphing Cocktail and V3 Morphing Starlett dresses. I can't comment on these, but it may be that they have morphs in the skirt part which are supposed to generate more realistic movement (at the expense of ease of animation, unfortunately). Select the skirt and see if there are any dials with meaningful names like "walk" or "sit" etc...

I just discovered -- The eyebrows appeared when I applied a mat map to M3's body and the lashes appeared when I then injected lashes. Before, I was trying to apply lashes without the mat maps. Apparently, that's how it works.

Another question: Where can I get regular hair for M3 that looks good? DAZ has some that either are out of the ordinary or they don't look real.

I am looking for a "normal" hair cut like someone might have in a corporation -- short and neat. (I have Mihai -- and Raoul, Allure and 3DWizard look fakey [at least to me] and Julian looks too much like Mihai)

Will the Morhping Flat Top work with M3? Unfortunately, the majority of men's hair is for earlier Michaels. I would like to try the ones from Kyoko (the men's) but they have such complex installation instructions that I can't figure it out.

Hair for earlier Mike versions work with M3, but you might need to rescale and move it around a bit. Not a big deal. Some of the best "normal" haircuts for Mike is Kozaburos versions of the old Poser 4 hairdos: On his site www.digitalbabes2.com you will find textures and trans maps for the Male Hair 1 and Male Hair 5, the old, silly looking "plastic" hairs from old Poser days... Since Kozaburo re-mapped them totally, you will need to create new obj files with Objaction Mover, but there are detailed instructions on how to do it from Kozaburo included (as well as link to download the Objaction Mover application). The result is worth the effort, they look great!

Some of the Mike2 hair from Daz has updates for M3 on the product pages. The morphing flat top is definitely one of them, I can't remember the others, sorry.

Lonranger, invisible things do render faster but trans maps have to be worked out by the renderer so they don`t render faster.

Thanks!

I'll add the there is some awesome looking P5 Dynamic hair available at RDNA (www.runtimedna.com). Price isn't as good as kozaburo's stuff, but the effect is. The way that poser works uses somethin called "bones" which determine how things move within it. Due to the nature of these bones, however, skirts are a rather big PITA and getting them to work in animations is very time consuming if the clothing involved is conforming. The DAZ clothing you mentioned is conforming clothing -- while not technically accurate, a conforming piece of clothing already has the basic bones of the figure it is for set up in it. In both cases of the dresses, you may notice these odd things that look like cones beneath the figures feet that don't show up when rendered. These are used to move the dress along with the morphs that are present. The dress morphs, btw, often mimic shaping morphs for the figure itself, allowing it to fit the figure better. as a note when animating, do it in small chunks. Generally only a few hundred frames at a time. It's just a wise habit. hth In poser 5, the dynamic clothing feature, however, features the ability to mimic cloth without relying on bones. The result will be much closer to what you are seeking, but will take a fairly long time to calculate. Installing Kozaburo's hair is not nearly as difficult as it sounds ;) One of the best tricks to doing so is to unzip them to one location, and then move the files over. Inside the location where you installed Poser, there is a folder called Runtime. Within that folder there is one called Geometries, one called Textures, and one called Libraries. Within the libraries folder is one called Hair. Most of Kozaburo's hair will unzip into a folder that has a runtime folder already in it. If you just copy that folder over to where you have poser installed, it will put everything in the right place for you.

Thank you very much for the caring, patient replies. I have not had the time to do it yet, but will soon try to work on the Kozaburo hair.

Part of the problem is that I was a bit lazy (and very busy) and wanted something more "plug-and-play." But there is very little good, short hair for men so I will check out the objaction thang.

Part of the problem is that I have done almost all my work in 2D (except for occasionally doing some very basic stuff in Poser, Cool 3D, Vue and Bryce). I now realize that for my work to grow, I need to delve more deeply into what 3D really is, and, of course, this is a whole new universe (compared to 2D) and will take much time. But I know the results will be worth it.

Again, thank you all for your help.