I am making some custom textures for clothing items and understand the general differences and such. What I am not clear on is what exactly or how I should make my "transparency" map from the original texture? It sort of looks like bump or specular maps from the ones I have looked at in the material room on other clothing items that use them. That is why I am not sure what I need to adjust in Photoshop for my textures if I want certain areas of the outfit to be transparent for making the map in Poser for it.

Thanks for any tips or advice on this. Also, anything to tell me the main difference in how to make specular and transparancy maps would help too.

If you want to see a part of the item it should be colored white.

If you want a part to be invisable color it black.

If you want it not invisable but see through color it a shade of grey.

simple.

As Kyhighlander said, you would then take that and plug it into the transparency channel in the material room and input 1 into the field.

What purpose do you want a transparency map for?  Maybe you don't actually need one, it kinda sounds like you're not sure.

Specular maps are basically white = full specular and black = no specularity, however you connect the specular map to the material's specular handling.  You can plug it into the root PoserSurface specular_value input, and the grayscale range from zero to 100% will be multiplied (0.0 to 1.0) with whatever number is in the specular_value field, or you can hook it to various other specular handlers in similar ways.  How you make the specular map depends pretty heavily on what kind of surface you're doing, but in general if it's a model that's supposed to be made of manufactured/machined material like you can get away without one.

each clothing item from DAZ should have a UV map template near the bottom of the product page. It may be easier to start from than an existing clothing texture. 

Thanks for the tips on using the Transparency Maps. I am trying to get an outfit to look  semi-transparent in specific areas and others to be more transparent or solid. Also I have been reading about what each of the channels does in the material room but it is bit complicated unless I can see something like it done on another clothing item so I can see the basics of how it was done.

So far I have managed to get the clothing material I used on an outfit to look transparent, but I seem to lose some of the texture on it when I do. I tried to adjust the "Transparency Falloff" which I can see makes adjustments for more or less when linked to my Transparency Map, but still working to figure all this out.

What do you want to do, have the appearance of space between loosely woven threads or what?

And if it's still not clear, here's an example of a clothing trans map and what it does to the dress.

You probably want to spell out exactly what parts of the model have the trans map applied (e.g. pretty sure the main body of the dress does not).  Black = Transparent, White = Opaque :)

Incidentally (since I happen to be working on just this task right now) you can do some very nice things with procedurals used to control transparency because they work well at any distance.  To get something this fine with a bitmap would require a really huge bitmap, or I suppose you could tile a smaller one as AndyStaples is doing.  This is a Tile node drawing white lines on black background.  While it might be more accurate to use the Weave node I had problems getting the space between fibres to be opaque where it neaded to be opaque, that node works much better for bump maps.

Thanks for the help on this and the images too. The effect I was sort of after is like what BionicRooster did with the skirt. If I understand, to get this type of look I would make a transmap for the clothing item black in the areas I want to be transparent and white for the areas of the outfit I do not. I can also control the intensity with the "Transparency Falloff" and link to the trans map I used for the regular transparency map?

I am trying to get an outfit that has textures of satin and velvet to be transparent to some degree (say 50%) for the satin parts of the outfit and have some of the velvet areas to be solid with fully tranparent areas in specific spots of the outfit.

pjz99 -

The clothing on one of the oufits is sort of like what you have posted here. I will study what you said there too, but I am not clear on what effect this had on the outfit. Are you talking about the texture of the green areas here or the bare skin areas? Not sure what you are trying to do here with that image is why I was confused.

Hmm if the effect of the cloth transparency isn't pretty immediately obvious then I'm sure it isn't what you're looking for, carry on ^^

BionicRooster -

It would help if you could post some "Material Room" screen shots of how you have the nodes setup along with the image maps in the small menus displayed. That would give me some more to work with and help see how you did some of yours.

Thanks.

Well my node setup is quite simple for that nightie.