I was wondering if there is a completely invisible material preset out there anywhere I can download. It'll greatly increase my workflow not having to change settings in the Material Palette every time I want a particular material completely invisible (I'm doing this a lot).

Thanks in advance...

Laurie

Ah right you are. Thank you kindly.
I wasn't sure if I could save Material Presets in Poser Debut... but after reading your advice, I decided to look a little deeper for a way to save it and saw the Add to Library button.

Thank you.

Laurie

Good to know Poser Debut can save some material settings ;). I have Poser 8 so it's sort of a no brainer, but I really don't know anything about Debut...lol.

Laurie

Thanks again for replying so quickly to my request.
With something as basic as the Hierarchy Editor taken out I was a little worried the ability to save things like Materials would be missing... thankfully not.

And as a DAZ Studio refugee I wasn't expecting the way to save something to be over under the content library (already checked under all of the menus at the top). It's a handy thing to now know, as I'm sure it'll come in handy again.

That's why some of us are simply unable to use DS. To me it is the most obvious thing in the world that if I want to add to my content library, the button to do so would be in the content library window. That's how my brain works, and my brain is completely non-functional every time I tried to use DS.

You probably don't know that the library window has a bunch of display options as well. At the bottom there is a thin pointy graphic we call the Klingon toothpick. Click that. Many options are revealed. Click it again to put them away.

Your right, now I know it is there it does make perfect sense.

The video tutorials bundle in with Poser Debut helped a lot in learning the Poser interface in a very short amount of time... (it was either that or relearn D|S from scratch since the GUI just had a major overhaul) but I don't remember adding anything to the library. If the videos did have that step I forgot, so glad help is always a post away here.

Quote - That's why some of us are simply unable to use DS.

I tried, I tried, I really tried...lol. Too Poserized ;o).

Laurie

Thanks grichter,
Not sure if it's the same in all versions of Poser, but I did find there to be ghosting, so clicked in the Transparency box (in the Material Palette window) when it said Click to Add Texture and click OK for No Texture and it seem to also fix the ghosting in the same way.

I wouldn't worry about not getting used to Studio's interface. Personally I would say Poser is the better choice anyway, because at least you can still open scenes created with it in DAZ Studio, but you can't do the reverse.

So if you started with DAZ Studio and make the change, then you have the long process of recreated all of your scenes in Poser. (which is what I'm doing now :crying:)

The black square is not doing anything, IMO. Please demonstrate with/without, as what you're suggesting defies my understanding of the math of Poser materials, and that cannot pass! grin

That was actually the biggest reason I wanted to have an invisible Material Preset, as a lot of times, turning the transparency to full didn't work, it still left ghosting... probably due to some settings I don't have access too in Debut so I couldn't see them as I changed everything else. So the suggestion of creating a Material Preset using the ground worked great since it was so generic.

Anyway the left render is effected by ghosting (around the arms) and the right is using the preset I saved earlier.

I think the transparency edge value should be 1?

Usually, if you've set the transparency to 1 and still see "ghosting", you've left the specular on (it should be 0).  If you only see the ghosting in Preview, don't worry about it.  The preview render settings include a limit to displayed transparency, and it is set to 90% by default.

Is your Transparency Falloff set to 0? Non-zero Transparency Falloff tends to "ghost" things up.

The image I posted of the Poser surface node has falloff at zero. I never leave that on for most things. I know in Poser 8 it does have a default value though and Debut might be the same. Afrodite-Ohki is right - that does need to be zero.

Oh, and grichter? I noticed that your Poser surface has the specular value at 1.00. Could that be why you have ghosting? I always change that to zero, even if the color is black just so I know I have NO specular...lol.

Laurie

Right - to get no ghosting the transparency falloff OR transparency edge must be 0, and there must be no specular.

Adding the image full of 0 isn't going to change any of that.

This first image is the Material Palette setting for the left render

This second image is the settings for the right render... so from this I can't see what would be causing the ghosting.

Uncheck multiply with lights. That may very well be your problem. That's the Kd Lite and Kd Multi I was referring to above. Do yourself a favor and just uncheck that with everything...lol.

Laurie

Thanks for the tip regarding Multiply With, but the strange thing though is that doesn't seem to have any effect on if there is any ghosting or not.

The second screen shot is of the Material Preset I saved that eliminates the ghosting... but I honestly can't see any difference there that should bring about different results. Stranger yet, the result that caused ghosting has a Falloff value of 0 while the one that worked has 0.600. 

I think I really have to put it down to settings that are hidden in Debut, so creating the Material Preset has been a HUGE help since I can use that now.

Eek...it's been forever since I've seen a material setup in Simple mode. All the way back to Poser 6 in fact ;). I guess that's all they give you to work with in Debut. Too bad ;). Maybe someday you can get a good upgrade deal to Poser 8! :D...lol.

The material room above all else drives me the most nuts. But it would suck if I didn't have it ;).

Laurie

I confess probably none of us who know materials know anything about simple mode. We can't see what's going on behind that.

I can understand why, not much to see there haha.

So this forum topic has been so very helpful for me getting around this little dilemma.

Since I just use the Anime EX Shaders for everything else, I was just missing the ability to make selected surfaces truly transparent.

So thank you LaurieA and everyone else for your help.

In preview if you have your settings like this

This isn't my invention. There are a lot of texture packs for the Morphing Fantasy Dress and it has a lot of material zones to change it from floor lenght to a mini skirt. Several have this trick and I just copied it. If you have a long skirt and you have transmapped it into a mini skirt you really don't need to bend it at the knees when putting the character inot a sitting position. But without that trick you have this tube sticking out from the knees that when posing the character is a major distraction.

Now maybe this isn't a windows thing and it could be just a Mac thing and my vid card that causes it.

I didn't realize you were talking about preview, gr. 

I have trouble recognizing when people are asking/talking about preview. I hardly ever use texture shaded preview any more. I use wire frame almost all the time. My complex shaders all show up in preview as solid white, for the most part, and texture shaded view is utterly useless. Optimizing it in various ways is an alien concept to me now. Preview, to me, is all about position - lining things up.