I am trying to setup a scene where I require some of my Daz figure imports from Poser to be transparent to a varying degree. In other words, I need to turn my imported figures into a hollow image without losing the figure detail. Such as a scene where one figure is looking THROUGH another figure and you can see some of what is behind them like a ghost or hologram. You will lose some detail of course with transparency but I want the figure to be clearly identifiable.

So, I have tried playing around with the materials in the "advanced material editor" when looking at the skin textures for the figures. But I can't seem to figure out if there is any way to do this because adjusting the "transparency" and "translucency" for them does not seem to give the effect I am after. I don't have any trouble of course working with Vue materials and adjusting their transparency, but making a figure's materials a certain degree transparent for the whole figure to be seen through is eluding me.

Has anyone done this or does anyone have any thoughts or advice on it?

Thanks.

I've tried it... several times, actually.  The problem with it is that the figures themselves are hollow, which means that when the front becomes transparent, so does the back, and depending on the pose, you will end up losing a lot of detail just because of the "overlay" effect.

dont use translucency - it'll add a lot of time to the render and wont give you what you want.

you will just have to play in the transparency tab until you get what you're wanting - i could tell you to try a trans setting of 25%, but it may not result in what you want - but could have been perfect for something i was working on.

Also dont forget to mess with the all important sliders and all those other lovely settings, as well.  additive and fuzzy each have interesting results.  also, dont forget the special effects catagory - luminosity, etc - when an item is transparent, luminous items can get quite interesting, too... =D

I can say the easiest way for me to do this ends up being in postwork - sad to say.  Set up your vue scene, and if you can, utilize the option that allows seperating out of layers/materials/whatever when you render.  This way, you can put say the front human figure on one layer, the one behind it on another layer, your ground/whatever is on another layer... so you can fade out/make transparent whatever you want.

hoping something in here helps...
~meli

Do you mean something like this?

sweeet, rutra... how'd you manage that one?

1) Import poser figure 2) Select it in Vue and in the material preview click on the little triangle and choose "edit all materials" 3) Go to the transparency tab, make it, say, 75% transparent (that's the number I used) and tick 'variable transparency' 4) edit the transparency function and create a node 'angle of incidence'. Connect to the transparency node through a bias filter. See screenshot. 5) adjust the bias filter to vary the transparency decay (I used 0.13) 6) now to the inside parts of the body (eyes, teeth, mouth, gums, etc). These need manual editing or it'll look funny. Select material by material and make it 100% transparent, not variable.

That's it. :-)

Quote - 1) Import poser figure

1. Select it in Vue and in the material preview click on the little triangle and choose "edit all materials"
2. Go to the transparency tab, make it, say, 75% transparent (that's the number I used) and tick 'variable transparency'
3. edit the transparency function and create a node 'angle of incidence'. Connect to the transparency node through a bias filter. See screenshot.
4. adjust the bias filter to vary the transparency decay (I used 0.13)
5. now to the inside parts of the body (eyes, teeth, mouth, gums, etc). These need manual editing or it'll look funny. Select material by material and make it 100% transparent, not variable.

That's it. :-)

Thanks, that's what I was trying to do but couldn't quite get there.

I was missing steps 4 and 5 and had not considered how to get that achieved. I was working with 70% transparency and tried editing all materials and some materials by hand but it did not work. The other steps you did was what seems to be missing so that should work just fine.

**melikia,

Thanks for your thoughts as well. I plan to try a combo of things now from what has been said and see what effects I can come up with. I am sure that using these methods will prove useful.
**

yeah roughly same trick is used ot make XRay materials ;)