I need to create a very thick hollow translucent ball. I'll worry about the scaling in Poser, but the dimensions would be a ball that has an 8 foot radius that's 6 feet thick, with the inner 2 feet being hollow. Can this be created in Poser using the primitives?

If you really knew what you were doing, you could probably do it with one sphere and creative use of the mat room.

Load a sphere primitive and scale it to an 8ft radius.  Edit/ duplicate object, and scale the second sphere to a 2ft radius.  In the material room, use the grouping tool to select all of the facets of the inner sphere and reverse normals.

Faster and easier to make this in a modeler program, though.

You can't really create thickness unless you model it in some way. All geometry in Poser is pretty mcuch hollow by default. It's not like Bryce where you can use volumetric geometry.

we may hafta wait til poser 9 for it to calculate transparency color and transmitted translucency, but it may be possible to fake it in earlier versions.  at least refraction works to some extent in poser, other than the tendency of a 100% transparent surface to darken what's behind it, when "visible in raytracing" is checked.

rename from txt to obj

I wound up having to fake it with multiple spheres.

I should have specified that I was under a time constraint and had to get something done Friday afternoon. It was also a case where I had an initial concept in mind and, as I played around with different things, the concept changed. I was trying to depict something with a plus and minus parameter with an interior safe zone (in meters--I said feet to stick to American units to make things easier). The first thought was to have a maximum and minimum radius and dark shade the area outside of the safe radius (the thickness of the hollow sphere).

I tried to create a boolean sphere in Bryce, but all the glass settings I tried looked weird. The core always wound up looking larger than its dimensions.

The image evolved from the original idea to one where it was necessary to show the plus/minus distances.

Now that I've played with Mark's sphere, I'm not getting the transparency look that I initially wanted. The inner core always seems to look like a solid sphere rather than a void. That doesn't seem to be duplicating what I'm familiar with when I look at a thick glass object with a hollow center. Maybe a cross section would be closer to what I'd initially envisioned. I don't need that since the faked graphic satisfied the people that needed it.

This is a fairly simple material for a luminous spectre...

This is what it looks like when rendered...

Remember to make mat zones such as inner mouth, teeth, tongue, eyelashes, pubic hair. etc invisible.

Attached Link: fire genie 4,637 KB ShockWave Flash animation