Thanks, it's a great looking model.  Lot's of possible environs the door can be worked into and the lower deck and staircase is a great extra touch.  ...might actually get a render out of me... ; )  Thanks, again.

also, if you have the atmosphere panel open and have realistic sky selected, you can drag and drop an atmosphere into it from the browser section of the panel below the workspace window.  Mind you, not the tab that says Scenes but rather the tab that says Misc.  Select it and then you see a list of categories.  Select realistic sky.  Any of those skies can be dragged into (onto) the atmosphere panel.  No cameras or lights will be set - you will have to recheck Enable Ground to off if you want it off or if it was already off from a previous go round.

Also, it might not look like it has worked (unless you did have the enable ground off because it will be checked after the drop).  It doesn't otherwise give any indication like some drag and drop functions that show a plus sign once you arrived where you want to drop

I believe the included PDF version of the manual could be printed at Kinkos and the like for not too much.

I too understand the impedous, especially from new Poser users to make fantasy bodacious women.  (I wonder what people are up to using the program and not even rendering these creations?  dialing up UP UP and squishing and zooming in and out are a few things that seem likely...)  But I still think it would be interesting to see what other models and products people have in their arsenals and what other visions may be lurking in their minds (unless it could be that there are no others).  Stretching a bit might be fun - after all, these women won't be going anywhere, they'll still be right there in your folders.  So far though, it sounds like it's much too daunting a prospect for a real Monthly challenge.  Interesting.  I'm surprised on the one hand and not on the other.  : )  

Attached Link: Examples

In the pic, you'll find some of the renders.  You'll see that the hair object never failed on transparency which I thought was... perplexing.   As I said in my first post, all transparency boxes were checked on - both in the GI section and regular options section.

Image A - was what was produced after the first render that worked with transparency but rendered blue.  All the renders after that had no brow and lash transparency.   One of those is Image B.  To me, the lighting on the model doesn't seem to match considering the brightness of the light coming from the upper right in the back of the image.

Image C - must be one of those wrong HDRI files for Carrara as it (along with some others I tried) only produced a background image to the horizontal halfway point...

Image D - after rebooting and reimporting my poser file, I was able to get consistant brow and lash transparency.  However, I also rendered each new image to a new window.  Prior to that I had been rendering over bad renders.  I wonder if that had something to do with the transparency checkbox not reading itself properly... or something.   Also Image D uses the same HDRI file as Image A; it's been rotated 180 degrees though and seems to match better lighting wise.  (In fact, the brightness on the model I think must be coming from that bright right side in Image A which is now behind the camera on the left since it was rotated.

So my conclusions are to use the proper HDRI, and to always do new renders to a new window.

Ok, to add to the confusion, after trying various other HDRI maps, I reopened the first HDRI I tried with my scene and model.  This was the one that rendered the model blue but had transparent brows and lashes.  Now the brows and lashes are not transparent so some thing screwed that up.  It could be now that the brow and lashes would render transparent with the other HDRI maps I tried but something got tripped up and won't fix itself until I likely start a fresh document and reimport the Poser model.

I'm going to start over and try one of the maps that didn't render blue... and see what happens.

Bother....  Here's another question I wondered about.  Do some HDRI maps work with Carrara while others don't.  Is there a type that's usuable and one or more that are not?

David

Damn. I just did a test and there IS an extremely faint hint of the non-mapped areas of the plane. So rather than delete my prior posts as they do address a method for using trans maps, it does appear that there is a problem with the transparency in GI not fully transing out.

Ok, just had the look I should have had before; this is how the eyelash channel is on my figure. It's a Multi Channel Mixer. Source 1 is Multi Channel and the color can be set (if you want the lashes to be a particular color), shininess, highlight, can be set as you'd like. Source 2 is Multi Channel and everything is set to None except for transparency which is set to 100% The Blender Channel contains the trans map image. Now, in the file I looked at, the invert (invert image) button was selected in the image map section. I've also seen it not selected and work. So if the above doesn't work, one could try inverting (or uninverting) that toggle.

The successful transparencies I've seen (for instance when I import a Poser Figure using Transposer2), do something, if I recall correctly, like this: The shader is a mixed channel shader. Source 1 has the head texture in it in the color component. Source 2 has a mixer and in the first part in the color comp. is the transparency map and in the blender channel in the transparency action and it's slider is slid to 100%. I'll check if it's otherwise, but transparency works something like that in Carrara.

Very interesting, cool and innovative.

As an aside, when Anton disappeared for awhile after having worked at Daz and everyone wondered what had gone down, he was respectful about not saying. However, if you read his marketing text for Apollo Maximus, you will (I believe) see just what went down. I LOVED reading it because (it's very clever, Anton) all the innovative points are coupled with phrases like "no more this and no more that". It all smacks of things he (you) must have presented to them as new ways to do the characters and they just weren't going for any of it (it would seem). Read that marketing text again if you ever wondered - I'd say no stone is left unturned. It's written (I believe) to Daz as much as to anyone else. ; )

But this hair idea is equally innovative and for whatever reason it's kind of amazing that a company in a position to use it, wouldn't go for it. : )

Very interesting and cool. Nice work. It reminds me of one of Georgia O'Keefe's animal skull paintings...

Exciting. Looking forward to seeing more. The 2nd one in image 1 looks a little Hillary Swank... : )

Better buy the stuff in my PoserPros cart and wishlist before they become DAZ priced. DAZ's prices seem to have gotten to a fairly uniform high...

I like Zere for M2 very much. And there is an M3 version. I think it's here on Renderosity. If not, try DAZ. But I find Zere to have very nice skin tone - he's rather dark; but warm.

I'm sorry to say that they've had enough technical problems and customer care problems that I (and quite a few other) haven't been a subscriber for a long time. The files have always been top-notch but everything else seems to blow. ...so I blew. I hope you'll have a better experience - but I only write to inform you of a history.