Okay, found a work around. Switched filter mode to "clip," and played around with it a bit. The end result is "close enough" for my purposes, but it is frustrating to have exactly what I want in the color channel, and no way to access it.

Hmm, my problem seems to be a lack of understanding of what the buttons do. I had thought that dimming the "A" button of a component would cause that component's alpha value to be ignored, but that doesn't appear to be the case. To work around this, I created a second texture with component one set to be the green portions of my texture and the other two components disabled. Working with the color selected, I was able to get the colors to invert properly by negating the "A" value (from 1 to ~ -1). Unchecking the "C" button to look at my alpha revealed a problem, however: The color circles along the side do not affect the alpha channel at all. You can see the problem this causes in the attached image: component 1, the color channel, has been modified to show what I want the alpha channel to look like. Component 2 shows the actual alpha channel... Many areas that should be masked out by the color selection are bright white. Attempts to raise or lower the overall color of the alpha by changing the filter graph resulted in "holes" in the mask (areas would become darker, black, then switch to white).

Perfect... Thanks a ton.

... I don't suppose you could post that online somewhere, and save a poor student a bit of time? :-P It looks great. Was that accomplished by changing the UV Map or manipulating the image texture? Is the donor texture Koz's other ponytail, or did you use a different source?

@Engelken: Koz's new ponytail has a significantly different look to it. It's very short, and looks pretty styled (unless there are some morphs that I'm missing). It just doesn't look quite right on the male character I'm working on. So far as remapping... I hadn't thought of changing the UV Map. I'll see if I can get it to be somewhat close to the layout on the new ponytail. @Saro, Cedarwolf: That's what I've been doing... Unfortunately, because the color was originally black, there are large spots with no detail. You can't see them in black hair, but they really show up in light color hair.

Heh, oops. I really get annoyed when Bryce grabs more than one slider like that. I intended to have ambience set to zero in that slide...

Remember: even if Bryce is used to save the .jpg file, there will still be image degredation (that's just the way JPEG compression works). You're better off going with a program dedicated to 2D images, and playing with the .jpg compression options (as others have mentioned).

If you absolutely can't stand the way .jpg compresses a file, you can use a lossless compression scheme (such as .png). Unfortunately, this scheme isn't accepted everywhere (Renderosity won't allow you to upload files in this format, for example) and results in larger file sizes than JPEG (because PNG is lossless). It is web-safe in most instances, however.

One last note: bitmaps are a lossless digital image storage format. This means that the bitmap is exactly the same as what you see on your screen when your render is complete... So the act of converting to .jpg with an external application does not introduce a loss of quality (although the application itself may introduce quality loss... Get it?).

Message edited on: 10/27/2004 23:12

Try extending the pose through more of his body... For example, right now his torso is perfectly straight. In a real person the arm positions would have a "ripple effect" on the rest of the body... So, bend the chest so that the top points more to his left (er, the bottom of the screen from this shot), bend his abdomen a little less than the chest, etc. You'll need to re-tweak the arms, neck, and head, but it should look a little more realistic... Other than that, looking good. Nice idea, and the streak effect is kind of interesting.

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com/tutorial/grouper/

FWTempest - Are you familiar with Grouper? In conjuntion with solo mode and the mesh selection menu, it makes texturing an object almost as easy as it is in Poser... Almost. Still working on trying some of these ideas out. Thanks a lot guys :)

This is what it looks like... The material on the neck/hand is with the bump turned up to 100%, the material on the head is as I described above. The spec map could still use some tweaks... Evening out specularity on the horns, teeth, and tongue comes to mind.

Never mind, I read my own post and figured it out :-P To make up for the board pollution, here's my solution (for future searchers): Basically, Bryce appears to be using a different scale for its bump maps. By decreasing the bump intensity, I was able to get my highlights to show up. Using the bump map as a specularity map restricted the highlight to the scales... The way it would be in an actual reptile.

Perhaps as a spray of dirt/rocks?

Thanks for the link (it should be useful in the future), but it isn't quite what I was looking for. I'm trying to get a simple, long hair-style for my elvish archers. Kozaburo's original ponytail worked for this, but the newer one doesn't (it is shorter, and looks more 'styled').

Well, DAZ has an EZ Pose add-on for it in their free archive... Other than that, I haven't seen much for it.

Yes, I have had QT on the older machine in the past and uninstalled it. That's probably the cause then, maybe I'll try installing QT on this system and see what happens.