I've been working on a model using the "male hair 1" in P4 and am trying to get the scalp to blend into the hairline in a more natural way. My problem is, when I use a transparency map to create the look of individual strands it looks great from the front, but from the side, it looks like the hair is hovering over the scalp and not attached. Starting on the scalp of the body texture-map, I've created a "hair" image that looks great for sideburns and the fine hairs at the nape of the neck, and use that as a "base". Over that I've tried 2 different methods with various results... 1) tried to "feather" the edges of the transmap with the smudge tool in Photoshop. This looks okay, but still lacks the "hair" look. It does blend better than the other technique which is... 2) creating individual strands of hair on the transparency map. While this makes more realistic hair, it also makes the model look like he had a hair transplant and has those ugly artificial "corn-row plugs". I've tried to follow the hair tutorial from the Digital Babes site, but don't understand how to make the under-layer of the transparency that gives the hair more body. Can anyone offer suggestions?

Yes, it would be nice to be able to use the nice variety of the supplied hair models, even more when you use the male's for the fem and vice versa. I played a bit with this on fem hair 3, with similar less-than-satisfactory results. Making a decent transmap may be the easiest part. I think at a minimum you need a cap-object underneath. Might be able to use the same hair object scaled down a bit. I also considered trying to group the top and undersurfaces separately; guess might have to reverse the normals of the underside to have the texture show. You'd still have to do something about the top, which would have that solid, angular look, maybe parent some whispy parts to it. All-in-all, a big task, especially to make it look good from all angles. Seems like there was mention of a hair kit, a cap and various pieces that someone was thinking about. Hope others can give you more specific suggestions. Would like to hear your progress. Never enough good transmapped hair!

Basically the hair 1 model is just one layer. You will need to add a second one to the figure and scale it up or down based on your need; to add another layer. You will need to export the hair model out of Poser and then bring it back into Poser, since Poser will does not allow adding more hair models directly to the model. I hope this helps. Sam