Okay, this might be a little confusing to try to explain, but here goes anyway. I am trying to adapt Ursula's Armor for Vicky for use in Poser, rather than Bryce, for which it was designed. (It can be found in Poser freestuff.) It consists of only a trans map and bump map to be applied to a Vicky figure. What I am doing with it is to load a Vicky figure and make all body parts invisible except for those which are affected by the mapping in the torso region (I am not using the gloves so I am making the arms and hands invisible also). I then assign the bump and trans maps and save the result as a figure. To use it, I load a Vicky figure, pose it, and save the pose (with morph channels). After that I load the armor figure, apply the saved pose, and align the two figures by matching all the "Body" dials. The individual body parts are then resized along the x and z axis until the armor shows. 104% or so seems to work. This worked great. You can assign any colors you want to the "skinbody" and "nipples" in Materials. BUT, the color was flat. I wanted a metallic look - like bronze armor. Here's the problem: I have tried to give the appearance of metal two ways - by using a reflection map, and by using the highlight color. Both methods do give the desired results on the armor EXCEPT for one thing - the areas of the figure that are supposed to be invisible (as determined by the trans map) have a sheen to them, making the figure appear to have a glossy effect to the skin when the highligh color method is used, and it's even worse with a reflection map. You can see that in images above. The one to the left is done with a reflection and the one on the right was done using a highlight color. Any ideas on how to get around this problem?

First, you'll get reflections from the entire original surface unless the "Reflective Color" is absolutely black. Second, the same will happen with the reflection map (no black option here). That's why I always build a new mesh with the unwanted stuff cut away if I want it shiny.

I was afraid of that. sigh Well, thanks anyway.

actually couldnt those maps, be used with the catsuit texture? all it needs is a few things moved areound from the two maps to fit the catsuit and it should work, if i knew more about texture maps i would have tried that already, it doesnt look like it would be impossible to convery to the catsuit?

Try turning Trans min down to zero - I'm at work at the moment, so I can't try it, but I'm pretty sure it will help...

What I do to make the chiny parts go away is turn the Reflection color to black and turn the highlight size all the way down to zero. Set the trans min, max, and fall off to the Maximum. As a recommendation for a shiny metalic color, here is what I do to acheive a silver look maybe you can change the colors for gold: I set the Ambient color to a dark grey, highlight to white, and object color to a light grey. See if that helps any. If not, try fixing the transmap to apply to the catsuit like Balaan suggested