I've never seen a thread on this and it only happened with one hair model by 3Dream (Aether Hair). The hair model rendered fine way back in Poser 7, but starting with Poser 8, I got something very strange happening. Load the hair to figure. Everything looks fine. Render. Looks okay. Go into the material room to change the hair color map and boom, the weirdness has begun! Poser suddenly is displaying the Color Map in the place of the transmap even though clearly the name in the node is for the transparency map. And if you render again, it will render using the color map in the place of the trans map. Which made the hair utterly useless to me bacause I do not know what is causing this to happen. So, it just wasn't a hair I could use anymore. A shame, because I really liked Aether Hair. Well, I bought Historical Curls a year ago from DAZ on a sale. I thought I would try it out and see if I needed to make a new color map for it. I need the wavy hair for a male character in illustrations for my friend's novel. The same texture weirdness is taking place with this hair model as well. I am posting a screen shot from the material room. This is what it looks like after rendering once, the color map is now displaying in the place of the transmap but the name for the transmap is still there in the node!!! How can this be fixed??? Is there a messed up texture reference in the hr2?

I had that too but not with those dos. I thought I was going crazy. I think it rendered normally or if I restarted poser it went back to normal, but I don't remember.

Transparency maps should be grey-scaled negatives of the texture map, if I am not mistaken.

Color maps have to be set at GC 2.2
Transmaps are grey scale and have to be set at GC 1.000

Never had a mix of one "polluting" the other.

I've had this happen with a few items. I haven't tried to track down what the issue is. For some reason, the preview image of a material, like a transmap, will display the 2d diffuse image.

It happens rarely to me, usually with hairs. But, that's probably because I just notice it there, more, since I frequently try to tweak hair materials.

As I said, I haven't looked into it. As long as they image file appears to be named correctly, it should render fine in my experience with this bug. It might be worth taking a look at the object file, itself, to see if it has some strange weirdness going on. (Shouldn't, though.) The same is true for the .cr2, of course. And, of course, check the directory to be sure there's no .mtl file in the object's directory present, causing confusion.

You said you're using the .hr2 file type. I don't know much about those, but they shouldn't be much different from any other file-type Poser uses, I would guess. After reading over your post, again, I noticed you said it renders with the color map in place of the transmap. That's not my normal experience when this occurs to me. It sounds like something that can happen when there's a conflict, like when a .mtl file is present in the same directory as its object file, forcing materials to be loaded despite what a CR2 or anything else wants to say about it. You'll have to look at the hr2 file.

Alternatively, you might try renaming all the 2d textures and/or relocating them, then saving the hair file under a new name to see if that clears it up.

@Morkonan, Thank you for really READING my post! I went and checked the Geometries folder for each model (3Dream Aether Hair and Neftis Historical Curls), there is no .mlt with the objs, so that is not the problem. I'm thinking it must be in the .hr2 itself. Some sort of texture reference that newer versions of Poser are reading differently than Poser 7 read them. When I load either of the hair models onto a character, they each come in properly with the color map and its transmap in place. I usually then run EZskin on them to set up newer node structure on them (3Dream back in the P7 days loved to use Ambient on hair). I render either one of those hairs once and everything looks fine. I go back to the material room after that first render and the transmap is no longer displayed, instead it's the color map, but the NAME of the transmap is still in the node information. And it will render that way! I have tried several times to rename the transmap, and I've even moved the transmap to a different location in the Textures folder in hopes of fixing this issue, but neither has worked. Poser just starts loading the color map in place of the transmap and that makes both of the hair styles unusable!!! Aether hair was one of my favorites and I can't use it anymore. I need the Historical Curls for a project, and I can't use it. I am hoping someone will read this thread and know what is going wrong here and tell me how to fix it. A long time ago when MAT Poses were new, I was taught to created one by hand. It's been a very long time since I've edited a Poser file in a text editor but I know that I can locate the texture references withing the .hr2, I just don't know what to fix or change in order to fix this problem.

And thanks again for really reading my post!

Unfortunately I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon for X-mas holiday. Maybe someone will have an answer for me when I get back.

It could be that there was an HSV node with saturation set to 0.00 between the transparency output and the regular hair shader? Personally, I would never do that, but if there's no transparency shader, perhaps that's what the vendor did to achieve the trans. It's the only way I CAN envision using the regular color texture for a trans since it would make the color texture black and white (but only to the transparency) ;).

Laurie

Okay, let me demonstrate further. I have done a screen cap of the node set up of Historical Curls right after it first loads and I apply new shader set up thru EZSkin. This shot is before rendering. It shows the transmap as it SHOULD be.  This is the BEFORE shot.

And then the shot from after a first render.

And all the other nodes are the same?

I don't have this issue with either of these hairs, so I'm wondering if running them through EZSkin is what's causing the problem.

I use Scenefixer, to get rid of unwanted ambient/translucence and to set the gamma correctly -- and that usually does the trick with most hair. But with 3Dream, I usually end up just reworking the mats anyway. I pretty much destroy overly complicated shaders (that is, any shader I don't completely understand) by every vendor who isn't called Bagginsbill.  Almost none of them are set up for GC.

Color maps have to be set at GC 2.2
Transmaps are grey scale and have to be set at GC 1.000

Never had a mix of one "polluting" the other.

Poser 8 doesn't have render Gamma Correction. Do you have the latest SR installed?  It puts Poser 8 to version 8.0.3.11793...

Have you tried applying EZSkin to the model before you load the hair?  If I'm following your screen caps, the change seems to come after you apply EZSkin. 

The issue does not occur upon applying EZSkin but rather after a render.  I would reload the textures after EZSkin and check if there are any undetected changes in the Mat Room before rendering.

When this happens for me, reloading textures doesn't do anything to correct the issue. Even items with a mat-pose and it being re-applied doesn't always solve this little weird bug. The only thing that always works for me is shutting down Poser so it can clear its cache. Manually clearing its "cache" doesn't help me, either, IIRC. (I don't think clearing the cache that way clears "everything.") With other issues similar to this, I've even had to restart the comp, which leads me to believe its could involve a deeper cache issue caused by something that upsets Poser's digestion.

Long ago, I did "fix it" once. And, no, like all useful information gleaned over one's lifetime of fiddling with small, irksome, issues, I don't remember what I did to fix it... :)