It's probably been asked before so I'll apologise if it's boring. Is there any way of transparency mapping the eyelashes in when you import figures into Bryce. I can get textures and bump maps to work okay but trans maps defeat me.

Trans mapping in Bryce is a puzzler until you figure it out, then it's a snap to do. Start by selecting the part you want to trans-map, and click on the M to get the materials editor. You will see a shape with the texture map on in the left corner and several rows of columns (some of which will have blue dots in). Right down the bottom of these rows is "Transparency". Choose an empty column (one with no blue dots in at all) and click in this row. On the very right, a new material box will open and you'll see that the sphere displaying your texture has gone very strange looking. Click on the P in this new material channel so that it's looking for a picture rather than a procedural texture. The go into image editor. It's very likely that Bryce won't have loaded the trans-map, so select an empty image slot and follow the dialogues to load your trans-map. You will now see the trans-map in the left-most image pane. Click on copy under this image pane, and paste it into the middle pane. Confirm that you want to delete the image that's already in there. Now you will see, in the very right-most image pane, a white shape that corresponds with the white parts on your original trans-map, surrounded by a grey and white checkerboard pattern. Click the check-mark to close the image editor. You will see that the sphere displaying your texture now looks even stranger than it did before :) Right above the material channels (that's the row of columns with blue dots in them) is a little triangle. Click on this and select "Blend Transparency" from the pull-down menu. Et voila, a transparency map applied to a material. This process will work for any tran-mapped object/texture. You can short-cut this procedure by using the "Steel Cage" material and editing the transparency channel in that to your trans-map. Either technique will work Hope this helps Paul