The effect I'm attempting to find a way to create is to simulate a flat surface glass pane that's been fogged up with condensation but someone has written a message in it with their finger. I've searched the forums here for various criteria and found the billbaggins thread that talks about having water droplets applied to a glass surface and that may turn out to be useful once I've attempted various transmaps in combination with it. I'm using Poser9. The idea I have a use for this is quite simple. I wish to render a scene with a nude female inside of a shower enclosure that has 3 glass walls and one tiled wall (one of the glass walls has a glass door on it as well). I want her to write "JOIN ME?" in the fogged up glass from the inside (so she writes it in mirrored letters so it's readable from outside the shower).

Using a soft-edged round paint brush in PhotoShop/PaintShopPro/PhotoImpact, draw the words in black on a white background. Use that image as a discriminator mask to control what part of the glass panel is fogged (white) and what part is clear (black).

If you can post (advanced material room) screenshots of the fogged glass material -with nodes expanded- I can be more specific. You'll need to know how the glass is UV-mapped, or test fit images to the glass to figure out the mapping.

Thank you for your help and suggestion. I never did quite get the hang of the billbaggins liquid drops thing figured out well enough to make it work for this but I was able to implement your suggestion with the transmapping. Because the shower's glass doesn't have a UVMap that's easy to use I had to do a few things to get it to work. First, I set the glass to completely transparent so it doesn't appear at all. Next, I added a hi-res square plane (from the primitives prop library). I used a paint program (GIMP to be exact) to create a 2048 X 2048 pixel resolution square blank image. I filled this with a dark gray color using the fillbucket tool. I duplicated this image so I could go back to the all dark gray image in case something went wrong. Next, I used the circular/elliptical selection tool and went almost corner to corner (about 100 pixels in from the top and side edge). From the SELECT menu, I clicked INVERT SELECTION, then clicked FEATHER SELECTION and adjusted the feather amount from the default of 5 to 180. I selected the color white from the color palette, selected the fill bucket tool again, and changed it's toolbox properties to FILL ENTIRE SELECTION then clicked in the image. This filled the outer edge of dark gray box with white but gave it an airbrushed gradient that faded inward to the gray. I duplicated this image (again to keep from messing up beyond recovery) and chose the paint tool, the round brush, and sized up the brush to 200. I selected black from the color palette and began to paint in stroked to try and simulate what one might create with one's hand if wiping it across a frosted glass pane. I saved this as a JPG and called it SHOWERGLASS_FIGURE_TRANS.JPG. I then chose the previously duplicated image (with the dark gray circle with white gradient airbrushed edges) and again used the circular shaped brush to write the words HELP ME! and saved that as SHOWERGLASS_FIGURE_TRANS.JPG. Inside Poser, I added a hi-res square plane to my scene and applied the first transmap to it's transparency node and set the transparency to 1. From the poser edit menu, I chose duplicate clothplane and moved the new square along the X axis. In the materials room, I browsed the image map node to change the JPG file to the second image I saved from GIMP. Then, I adjust the scale, rotation, and position of each square for the scene's requirement. So now I was able to render the scene I wanted to create. I'm attaching the file to this post so others can see the result and be able to benefit from the advice and technique given here.

Nice one! Or two, perhaps. ;) Good squish effect there. :D

Couldn't she bash out the glass using the shower head? Has to be worth a try.

If the glass in the booth is badly mapped, had you considered remapping it? UVMapper is great for stuff like that.

It's not something remapping it with UVMapper can fix. The square cloth plane works perfect because it uses a square texture. Any remapped version of the shower glass would always involve something a little difficult to work with. As far as busting out the glass goes... there are several inconsistencies that would need to be explained in order for this predicament to make sense at all. We can presume the glass is shatterproof and that the showerhead isn't removeable. We can also presume that there's some sort of watervalve override in place that prevents her from just turning the water off. There's also the peculiarity of being no floor drain but one could have speculated it was plugged somewhere down the pipeline. I toyed with trying to change the wall textures to something more expected with a shower scene. I tried to use a reflective tile material but it obscured the ability to read the words fingerpainted in the glass fog. Apparently, darker colors tend to accent that aspect a little better than light colors (in this lighting at least). You can see how well pronounced the handsmearing of the fog is in front of the dark brown wood but not as identifiable with the lighter wall texture. I'm also not real super happy with the way the edge of the planes don't really line up with the water's edge that well. It was the first attempt and I know how I can fix it. I believe the problem lies in that the texture maps for the square clothplanes are indeed square. If they were rectangular with the height about 2.5x the width...and I made just one instead of two...then I could make the edges more "water residue" around the entire glass area (and duplicate that for the side as well). I'd also like to completely eliminate the light glare on the bottom front of the glass but I don't want to turn off any of the lights because I am quite happy with the way the scene is illuminated currently. I think it's actually bouncing off the water's reflectivity so perhaps I can try adjusting that some.