Perhaps I've got the wrong idea, but I was under the impression that transmaps allowed you to see throuh things in poser. For example, applying a transmap to the solid hairpieces make them transparent in places. With me so far? Good. :o) Now, I've taken the P4Male template and made what I consider to be a transmap - black parts are invisible, white parts will appear. Is this correct? If so, why, when I apply the transmap (select render/materials then click the Load button in the Transmap box) to the P4 Male, does it not make parts of him invisible? Or have I just learned something the hard way? :o) Any help would be gratefully received!! - Hairy

OK. First you need to load the transmap into the transparancy channel. Then you need to play with the transparancy sliders. I don't have Poser reinstalled on this machine (the curse of upgrading), so I can't give you the exact settings for certain, but IIRC, you need to set the minimum transparancy to at least 50% and maximum to 100, and the falloff value very low, but you may need to tweak these in order to get the desired level of transparency in the render. Now it depends on your display settings as to what you'll see - but when you render, you will see segments of the model become transparent regardless. It's covered in the manual, but not particularly well (this is one of the more confusing sections, IIRC).

Everything looks correct so far, but what did you set your transparancy min and max sliders to?

Here's the thing - I didn't know I had to set a transparency slider. Now, five minutes later, I've selected the "Skin" part of the figure and gave it 100% transparency. Hey presto - instant man with chunk of his arm missing. :o) The other thing is, despite having full 100% transparency selected for it, there's like a skin coloured aura around the transparent bits. Is this caused my the balck bits being painted onto only one side of the body? I'E., the front half? My conclusion (stop me if I'm wrong!!) - if you tell a transparency map to apply to a certain body part, it will only make the parts of the body invisible which are under black pixels, white parts will not change, and you get gradient transparency depending on the darkness or luminosity of greyscale used...? Thanks for all your help, guys! Cheers! - Hairy

That skin colored aura may be due to your highlight settings, but it's hard to tell for sure. Changing your highlight color to true black may help.

Glad it worked out.

{Is this caused my the balck bits being painted onto only one side of the body? I'E., the front half?} Could be. Could also be due to the texture map on the body, if there is one, or a Transparancy Falloff value that's set too high. Play with that slider for a bit first, just in case.