I'm making a transmap to make a part of a character's leg disappeat (for a peg leg prop I'm making. I've created the transmap, have applied it to the leg material (and the feet and toenail materials, too), and it looks the way I want it to, so far. I want to be able to apply this transmap to other characters without overrwriting the character's texture; in other words, apply the transmap and leave the character undisturbed. Is there a way to create a material file that can do this?

Dead easy if it's a set of Unimesh characters you're using. Just apply the same transmap to the character of your choice. Or am I missing a vital point here?

Well, I was hoping that I could set up a material set that would apply the character set to the leg, foot, and toenail materials simultaneously, without my having to go in and apply the transmaps individually. Sorry, guess I forgot to explain that.

Message edited on: 12/17/2005 14:49

Erm, I think you can by saving the whole thing as a Material Collection. I haven't used the function so I don't know for sure how it works but I seem to recall it's a kind of P6 MAT file, which will load everything at once.

I can save it as a materuial collection; that's no problem. The problem I'm having is saving the transmap as a material collection, without saving the skin as part of that. If I make a material collection with the transmap applied, it'll save the transmap, but it'll also save the skin texture. If I reapply the material collection to another character, the leg will disappear, but the skin will change, too. I want to be able to make the leg disappear without changing the skin of the character. Say I have a light-skinned character, and a dark-skinned character, and I want to be able to apply the material collection with the transmap to either one without changing the skin of either character.

You'll need a script or utility like ShaderSpider to add extra nodes. Material collections (MC6 files), and material (MT5 files) can only be used to setup a complete shader tree. YMWV with P4/PP style MAT poses.

You don't need to use the map on the feet and toes, just turn off the visibility for those parts. The map is only needed for a body part where you want part of it visible. Doing it that way means you only apply the map to one part.

Yeah, but then I have to go to the hierarchy menu and turn off all those individual parts one by one. I basically want to be able to make them go away with one clik. It sounds like ShaderSpider's partial shaders are what I'm looking for, though I'm surprised there isn't a way to set that up manually in Poser 6. Guy

There's very little difference between a material collection and a MAT Pose, just the filename and a little bit at the beginning. What you need to do is remove the material info that you don't want to change. A whole material is easy, even with a hand edit, and that would let you change the body texture without changing the head, for instance. More detailed trimming gets tricky. You need to retain the structure -- those nested brackets -- and the connections. I have several items which have partial MAT poses to add bumpmaps, but the whole structure of a P5 file is much more complicated... (Checks) Little_Dragon has done it for his Furrette 2 character. It looks obvious to me, but I'm not going to try to explain it...

I thought it was something like that, Antonia, but I haven't mucked about much with the workings of MAT files or material collections. I have messed around with cr2 files a bit, though. If you can think of any tips, I'd appreciate knowing about them. Guy

Wll, the difference between Material, Material Collection, and MAT Pose seems to be pretty slight. They all start with the version number block. Then: Material: "actor $CURRENT" Material Collection: "mtlCollection" MAT Pose: "figure" The rest of the file is identical, but the basic Material files doesn't seem to care about the actual name used for the single material it contains. Now, I have examples of partial materials in MAT Pose files, but I haven't tried these in a Material file. And because a Material file replaces the whole shader tree, I doubt a partial one would do anything useful. It would have to be matched to the material it modified.