Suppose I have made a texture in Paint Shop Pro for a tight-fitting article of clothing, like a bikini top, using the character's torso map as a reference. I have made it as a transparency. I can easily layer it onto the skin in PSP, but then it is part of the skin, and uses the same shaders as the skin. I want to add it as another layer so I can give it different material settings. I'm still not very good with shaders or materials in Poser so I'll probably just load a preset from a folder, to make it look like cloth. How do I make the character wear it?

I´ll be uploading my products Boudoir Powder,  Dawn second skin to freestuff in short, hope you can figure out the node settings from there, not fancy, simple blender node on Dawns body and hip. :)

Ok, so I am in the advanced material room for the torso skin. I am using Poser 10, and the figure I’m working with is V4. (Yes, I know she has plenty of clothes, but I also know this will come up a lot in general and I will need to know how to do it. Anyway, I specifically wanted a ‘40s style bikini top, with thick straps, and couldn’t find one. If anyone knows where I can find such a thing for free or cheap, please direct me to that as well, and it will solve this particular case, but I still want to know how to add second skins.) So, the first thing I do is create a blender node and connect it to the skin? And then I suppose I need to import the second texture? I don’t see an option to import an image, how do I get the image into the advanced material room? Is this correct so far?

Ok, I work with Dawn and PP2014, but its the same procedure, here is a image showing the material room and nodes.

links for

Semidieus Advanced Shaders at RDNA
Advanced-Shaders

and

Advanced Shader Tutorial pdf

Ok, thanks, that was a lot simpler than I thought it would be. The clothing still looks like skin, though, like a tattoo. How do I make the skin shaders only affect the skin, and apply different settings to the clothing? (The skin I am using has a lot of complicated nodes- actually I'm not even using the skin itself, I swapped out the texture but loaded it just for the complicated nodes because I don't know how to do that stuff myself, and it looks good in renders, but I'm not attached to it, I just want the skin to look skin-like and the clothing to look clothing-like.)

You will have to make the shader that is skin-like into its own group (all comes to one node, one pin)

as well as make the cloth shader that is cloth-like or leather-like or whatever into its own group (one node, one pin)

and then you take those two pins into the Blender node as you're doing, which then goes into Alternate_Diffuse.

To do this you will use none of the built-in diffuse or specular on the root surface node.

This raises the question - how.

For that you'll want to learn to build shaders in general - a very lengthy discussion.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2832094&page_number=2#msg3823124

Read all about adding a second skin in this tread here above, see how the nodes are build, and read what they do.

 This is adding a second skin, and using the nodes in the advanced material room to create the Blender mask internally.
The color of the clothing can also be adapted by changing the Input_2 color in the Blender node.

Also see how I build the bump/displacement from the cloting diffuse texture. to get thickness in the clothing.
Right click should get the screengrabs in full size on your HD.
Well, it did in the past but with the current forum degradations, one never knows any more.
Best regards, Tony
 

This is an old post of mine, still using Diffuse..

As BB wrote ;  in the newer Poser versions you can build shader groups for the skin and for the clothing, and use the blender node to blend them into alternate diffuse.

 
2 more examples using different textures and node setups (old style)
The one below is a different texture and it uses a mask. (But I woulld not do that any more, and let Poser build the mask internally as in the example without mask shown above. => That works perfectly if your texture background is true White.

Is there any advantage in not using the mask, since I already took the step of making it?

The end result is the same.
Working without a specific mask texture, makes jiust one less texture to load, one less texture to worry about.
And? The Poser node system can do it automatically, so why not use it?

Thanks, everybody, I'm off to study shaders for a while...