Hi 

I have Poser Pro 2010 and I run windows 7 on a 64 bit system. I want to make some 2d props so I can create my own unique environments in Poser. But I am a bit stumped. I have tried using brushes in gimp with a transparent background and then saving as a jpg and loading to a hi res square in material room, but the square renders black behind the brush image. Can anyone help? And/ or point me towards some good 2D prop tutorials? 

Thanks!

Heather

Create a silhouette image and plug that into the transparence in the material room.

Set transparency to 1.000 and fall off to zero.

Building on PhilC's advice, also plug in your transparency map into the Specular value, as I've found if you don't, the transparent parts still get highlighted by lighting.

thanks for replying. I created an image using the brush in gimp in black on a transparent background and saved as a jpg. (Is this what you meant by silhouette) then I set the transparency to 1 and fall off to 0 as you said. And plugged it in to transparency. As you can see I can see the square which is what I am trying to avoid. I am sure I misunderstood something!

Heather 

You need to create a black and white trans map to plug into the transparency input... in gimp create a selection for your image, anything that you want to be transparent in poser must be solid black. Solid white= visible. Varying shades of gray yield varying degrees of transparency. Do you have any transmapped hair models for poser? Open one up in the advanced tab of the material room to see what is going on. Additional note, when applying an image to a square in poser, scale the square to match your image aspect ratio, i.e. if the image is 250x250 scale the square, say, +250 X Scale and +250 Y Scale. You can then scale uniform to suit your scene.

www.drgeep.com/

For various tutorials on poser fundamentals and beyond, keep in mind that some things have changed since these tutorials were written. The nuts and bolts are basically the same, however.

this is what i did with a png render

defringe the image, duplicate the layer and gaussian blur the bottom layer and duplicate that layer a couple of times, this will mean that you get a nice edge. save that as a jpg

Take the top layer which has most of the detail and hide all other layers, turn this black using your darkness function, flatten this so that the background is white and invert this so that the image is white on black and save as jpg

add this black image to your transparency node and ensure the edge and falloff is both set at zero and transparency at 100%

add the image to the difuse colour node and set both images as crisp

be careful of shadows that fall on this prop as it might be a giveaway for the fact it is flat, also its best to have it facing the camera head on as any angle from this will distort the image.

oh and make sure the highlights are set to nothing (black) or it will end up shiney

Whenever I make trans-maps, I always shrink the selection by 1 or 2 pixels to remedy that.

if the item had holes within it rather than solid wouldn't that be off centre for the bits in the middle?

Wow thanks for all that everybody. I'll give it all a go and see what I can come up with. How do you add color to different parts of the image if it has to be all black and white? Thanks!

The color is driven by the diffuse image map, not the transparency.

The Transmap is the black and white image, the image with the colour plugs into the diffuse colour node, (see above mat rooms by me and primorge)

i am not familiar with gimp but would suggest you might want to experiment with a png picture on a transparent background to start with

Great thanks! You guys saved me a lot of frustration. :-) 

I've been struggling with this very issue for most of the year. CGCookie has a good tutorial on this, but I could never get it to work. From instructions by the kind folks here, I have come the closest I have been able to thus far. The attached image show my latest attempt. As you can see, the image is blurry and has a white ghost shadow noticeable, especially around the trunk. I followed Lully's instructions and copied her settings to my app and get these results. I am running PP2010 on a 32 bit Win XP box. I have been struggling with this because I have Terra Dome, which is a delicious resource, but lacks any kind of trees or greenery. This would work great for me if I can solve these issues. BTW, PP2010 dioesn't have the option to set the images as crisp - at least not as I can find, anyway. Close, but no cigar! Any feedback much appreciated.

Peace,

Charlie~

Check the gamma setting for your transparency map.  It should be set to 1 if you are using render gamma correction = 2.2.  Otherwise, BionicRooster's recommendation is the best solution.

I think  crisp is new for pp12, try 'none' rather than quality, I always find quality is the opposite and goes blurry.

Also, not sure how big your image is but needs to be bigger than you think, incase you decide to render big scenes in the future, I did mine at 2000x2000 on 300 dpi and still don't think that is big enough.

Try the blurred under layers as i mentioned above, that may remove the white edges or at the least change the background colour to your image to the same as the majority of your pic, in this case the leaf colour

PS I found out about the blurring when i looked at 3dream's free 2d people and thought it worked well, you might wanna check out his pack on his site, just google 3dream and 2d people, (not sure if i can post it here) it might give you some more hints