I used File/Import Background to install a background from the Poser CD. No matter what I do... everything remains transparent? In render/materials I've gone to 'skinbody' and 'skinhead' and tried the settings at 0% .. 50% and 100%. It's the same whether I use a texture or not. What's up with that?

Do you have the depth cue turned on? -JH.

Ah ha! Good call I just re-installed everything after having to reformat because of WindowsMe. I must have hit depth-cueing when I was turning on full speed tracking. (I don't even know what it's for?) I rendered again and it's fine..except those lines are still appearing on the shorts? (shorts are free at zygote today for anyone who has Michael) Thanks for the help Jeff

I just re-loaded the shorts to try and figure out why those lines are appearing. They only appear when I add the texture. I tried using the texture as a bump map instead and I got this weird artifact that you see just above the shorts. When Michael is in the scene it appears as part of his skin and is aligned with the joint between his chest and stomach?? Weird

Upon further review.. I see that the texture that they gave with the shorts is only a template. I suppose you 'paint' over the lines and that hides them? I still have no idea what that weird garter belt thing is. Anyone else get the shorts yet?

The garter thingie is named "chest" and is in the materials group "skin". The default settings for thransparency min and max for "skin" are 100% when installing the shorts. It renders invisible, and probably fits inside Michael anyway. You could also uncheck the "visible" box in the properties dialog for it, then re-save it to the library.

Yeah.. I see that 100% is the default setting under 'skin' (what's the diff between the 'skin' and 'shorts' settings?) I selected 'Body Parts/Chest' and found the area you mentioned under 'Object/Properties' and saved the shorts with an 'invisible' chest property. What is that thing anyway? Something that helps the shorts to stay aligned or move properly? Thanks for the tips wulf

The shorts are a conforming figure, not a prop, and the "chest" part is needed for it to conform. The "skin" is the material for the chest part, and the "shorts" is the material for the main part of the shorts.

Ah haaaa You are very wise

To find out exactly what material is what, change the colors. That's what I did.

Clever I've just switched to a texture by the amazing Catharina. I figured out problems I was having with lips and nipples. The body color was way too dark and I fixed that by changing the color to white. I'm still trying to figure out how to get rid of the black eyebrows though. I tried drawing on the texture.jpg but it's a photograph and it's kind of tough to keep it real. I'm going to buy her different hair color templates now... but I'd like to be able to change the color of those eyebrows... and the goatee on the 'alternate' head texture. (Using Michael's eyebrows over them didn't work too well. His eyebrows look best with a lot of transparency and the black ones showed through)

Yeah, Dillinger, usually the best thing to do with a figure is to set the object colors to white, and then save it to the library so you don't have to go through it all again, that way the texturemap shows better. I haven't purchased Catharina's maps yet, but I intend to. She is an amazing artist. Changing colors on a part of a texture map would be a tough job. If you can select the eyebrows by color, and get most of them selected, you might have an easier time. Try changing the color, tone, and hue properties. Maybe even brightness and contrast.

I've taken the face map into fireworks and tried selecting it with many different degrees of 'tolerance' .. but I'm not getting very good results no matter what effect I try and apply to it. I'm going to just try and draw over every hair using my graphics tablet and see how that looks. It's tricky because the lines you draw are pixellated when you're zoomed way in.