Hi, I have been playing with HDRI lighting and have been having fun with the results, mostly. However, as you can see in this pic here, there appears a strange halo around the edges of the hair. Is this because of the particular transparency map or is it a problem with Vue 5?

hi there, looks really great : ) may i ask what did you do with the hair? all i can get is just blurry/distorted hair :< Would you post a sanpshot of your setting? TIA

That's one of Kozaburo's hair peices, isn't it? The shaping of the feathered ends give it away. It's an issue with the setting of the transparency value; what is transparent in Poser isn't quite transparent in Vue; particularly the more realistic the lighting gets. Open the hair in the material editor and check your transparency and translucency settings, and adjust until the effect goes away.

Since you have back lighting it appears, you may want to go into the EFFECTS panel of the Atmosphere Editor and turn OFF the "Default Lens Flares"- both check boxes. I personally wish that lens flares in Vue were OFF as the default setting, rather than ON. That's just my guess as to why you may be getting a Halo Effect...

Looks like a transparency issue. Check that "Falloff Transparency" in the P5 material room is at 0. Sometimes when applying mats, it will set it to 0.6 or something, which could cause ghosting in transparent objects.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, will try them out and post back

I've had that a number of times in Vue (4, 4 Pro and 5), with all types of atmospheres. I think the basic problem is that jpeg compression algorithms are petty badly suited to transmaps. They search first for close value pixels and average them. I've taken some jpg transmaps into a pixel editor and found no absolute black (total transparency), I suspect that Poser uses some kind of 'threshold' value.

Jwhitham, if I remember well Vue (at least Vue 4) can "read" a gray maps using 256 values only. ***Luca aka cinacchi