I believe light will not pass through the solid parts of a transmap material. They are a few pictures in the Art Gallery showing window blinds with light coming through just the open slits. I hope this helps. Sama

Theoretically setting transparency max to 100 and minimum to somthing greater than zero should make the 'solid' (meaning white) parts of your transmap semi transparent. It doesn't actually seem to work though. Also I have most of my lights set to cast minimal shadows and I am unsure how transparent items interact with poser lighting. An interesting question...

Im haveing trouble figureing this one out.

Increase the contrast so it's more black and white. I will nab this and see if I can make it work. Map it to the one sided square and place the square on the left side of the poser scene. Then select the square and 'create spotlight' this will ensure you have a light pointing directly at the square. This should cast shadows on the center if it works. If you still can't see it tryturning the other non spotlights off. That should tell for sure.

Someone in the gallery discovered an answer to this problem simply by messing with transparency while trying to imitate silk. An object with greater than 50% transparency will not cast shadows. Less than 50% it will cast shadows. Seems 50% is the cutoff point. So you could try really strong light shone through your transmap set to 49% trans. But I doubt it will work. Youre going to have to model the leaves yourself.

Ill try the tree mesh idea idea, I think it will provide a really nice effect.

Hmmm looks like you got results, Nice from, What I can see too.

MAYBE If you take it into trueSpace and tile it maybe 3 times it will have finer resolution?

The actual answer to your question poses your question backwards...will light actually pass through the translucent parts of a transmap? The answer's no...basically what HandSpan said. If you create a window in a wall by creating a transmap for a square, the whole mesh creates the shadow, so light doesn't "pass through" the mesh, because it's still solid, you just made part of the solid invisible. You can see through, but light doesn't understand that. I made interesting dappled light patterns by using lots of little shapes on a single plane beneath a spotlight. They weren't leaf shaped, but it looked like sunlight through leaves. Can't find the render though...have to look. GrayMare

It does work .. It can be an utter pain to get it to line up right and all but it does work. Did it once and then decided not to try again cause it was such a pain. But I had a smaller map to play with and was trying for a more specific target.

That's what render # 13 there shows- it's working. There is light passing through just the transparent parts of the cube that is positioned between the lights and the ground. You can see that right? The cube has the trans map in post #4 applied, all I did was increase the contrast a little. I wish it was crisper but that probably is a function of the light start and end settings or some esoteric thing like that...

Oh and GrayMare, if you performed your experiments with just the square or the single sided square (as in what a wall or window are 90% likely to be) please see the other posts here, they show that the light doesn't see these props at all but only recongizes 3d objects, that is objects with values of more than zero on all three axis. Note the different results between the square and the cube shown above. Also the fact that the cube went from casting a shadow to casting no shadow when I scaled iot to zero on the y axis.

That's looking good. You might also try changing the hilight color and % on the skin, and the reflection color. The hair looks fantastic. You can use the same picture you have in the bacground as a reflection map too. Apply it to somthing shiny such as a wide bracelet. It really helps a lot to integrate your figure with the background.

It will work and it will work with single sided squares. Two factors may be affecting your renders. First, no "simi-shadows" from gray areas of shadow map - they are either on or off - only transparency map luminance values above 40% will cast shadows and all cast shadows are opaque. You can however, soften the shadow edges and blend them together (3rd image) by using a larger view from the light's ShadowCam. This may also be your second problem. If the area for the cast shadows is too small in the view from the light's ShadowCam, then there will be too few pixels covered and therefore a low-res shadow that is aliased too much and too soft to be visible. If so, move the light closer or zoom & reposition the light's ShadowCam.

hmm a pz3 modelof the settings would help ,Not sure what you just said but it looks like you solved it.

I'll post a .pz3 if you like, but first just try viewing the scene from the Shadow Cam of the light that is casting the shadows of the transmapped object. (select it from the list of cameras in the pulldown menu under the scene display window) From this view: - Make sure the object is actually between the light's ShadowCam and the location you want the shadows cast. (To make it easier to move, parent the object to the light if you haven't already.) - Use this cam's Zoom dial to get the scene to fill the frame. The more it fills the frame - the sharper the shadows will be when rendered. If it's just a tiny bit of the frame, the shadows will be too diffused to be seen. Waiting on a render using your transmap image posted above.

If you look at render#8 the prop is between the light and the ground, it is 100% the same size and position as the ground but y transed up. The dimention that is zero is the y axis and so i think that is the problem. That is there's no area between the light and the floor really because it is zero on the y axis. The trans percentages were not chnged between the render #8 and the one done with the cube#8 and #10. One shows and the other does not. No other settings were changed either. See what I mean? I do also see what you mean about percentages but I am most puzzled as to why you are getting your result and I'm getting mine. There is no transparency at all on render #8. That means the floor should be completely in shadow from the one sided square covering the whole surface above the ground with the only light source being on the opposite side of it. Cast shadows is 'on' on both the light and the prop, recieve shadows is 'on' on the floor.

That's too bad it's so hard to set up. This is one of the reasons I did all of my rendering in Bryce at that time.

Hanspan - it just looks like your scene occupies too small a portion of the shadow map (generated from the light's shadow cam) and what few pixels there are, are blown away by anti-aliasing when the maps are mixed for the render. Or, to say it another way, your shadows are there, but they are just too low res and antialiased so much that they are getting completely blurred out. Ya needs mo pixels! At the risk of becoming tedious, take a look at your scene in reply #8 and view it from the Shadow Cam of the overhead light. If your scene appears very small in the center of the frame from this camera view, just zoom in the Shadow Cam until your scene starts to fill the frame. Using this greater larger portion of the frame gets you more pixels of the shadow map actually allocated to the cast shadow areas. This will make the shadows more pronounced with sharper edges when you return to your regular camera view and render. And Spike, its really neither hard nor time consuming, I'm just not explaining well. As you can see in the three images above, its actually quite predictable and controlable.