I have seen clothing and other items where parts (a material zone smaller than the body part) can be made invisible via a morph dial that is set to either zero (visible) or 1 (invisible). How is this accomplished?

I tried to simulate the effect by loading a morph target in which the part in question is moved out of sight, say below the floor or outside the wall. But that results in the whole room mesh being crunched when the dial is used.

So how is invisibility of a material zone or zones incorporated into a dial?

Go to the properties panel and next to Visable is a key, click on it and that creates a dial that you can hide and unhide that object/body part/prop.

I'll be damned. I never noticed that little key before. It works great for an entire prop or body part, though I could click the eye icon in the Hierarchy panel instead.

I was wondering about parts of props or body actors. For example, in some fantasy outfits there are dials to make the spikes or other pieces disappear, not the entire Shin or Forearm sections of the outfit. An example is the Black Lotus leather fantasy harness. Various straps that are not body parts can be made invisible with a dial. Somehow the dials affect only specific material zones.

Thanks for the tip about the Visible key. There are situations where that can be very useful.

One of the new features introduced in P7 was making the "Visible" property animatable (which is what clikcing the key does).

It's a simple on or off, but that is still useful.

You can do the same thing for a material zone, but it doesn't work quite as well.

(It turns the zone Transparent, which isn't always purely invisible.)

In the Material Room, find the Animatable key for Transparency Value, and

click it to green.  Poser will then automatically create a new dial on the prop,

or on the Body if you're using a figure.  Resave the figure or prop, and the

dial will be there.  In some cases you may need to animate the

Transparency Edge dial as well, using ERC to make a single control for both.

On the occasions when "Transparent" wasn't 100% invisible, it was usually because Falloff was still at the default .600 or some other positive value. Or there was something still reflecting light. When I would turn all reflections to total black and set the Falloff to zero, the little glimmer of an outline would go away. Of course there may be some other buggy factor in Transparency I haven't run into.

Thanks, ockham, I'll have to give that a try! 

Here is something I did with a prop, though much the same sort of thing should also be possible with a figure. This isn't exactly an answer to the question you asked, but might be of use to someone. You can animate the Texture_Strength of a transparency map. With the dial set to zero the map has no effect. When the dial is set to one the transparency will work.

An advantage to this method is that you can make only part of a material transparent, and in theory at least, with a bit of ERC you should be able to make several materials (or parts there of) transparent. If you plug the transparency map into the Specular_Value, as well as the Transparency node, you can keep specularity working on the visible parts, whilst precluding specularity from transparent parts, but you must remember to set the Transparency_Falloff to zero.

In order not to have the transparency showing by default in the P6 screed preview, I had to use a bit of ERC to slave both the Transparency_Value and the Texture_Strength of the transparency map to a valueParm dial "Make_Hole". With this set up the transparency only showed when the image was rendered, not in preview. The relevant code in the pp2 was as follows:ProSpell Demo Version

           valueParm <span style="color:#00ff00;">Make_Hole
</span>                 {
                        name Make_Hole
                        initValue 0
                        hidden 0
                        forceLimits 0
                        min -100000
                        max 100000
                        trackingScale 0.004
                        keys
                                {
                                static  0
                                k  0  0
                                }
                        interpStyleLocked 0
                        }

                shaderNodeParm Preview_PoserSurface_7
                        {
                        name Preview_PoserSurface_7
                        initValue 0
                        hidden 1
                        forceLimits 1
                        min 0
                        max 1
                        trackingScale 0.01
                        keys
                                {
                                static  0
                                k  0  0
                                }
                        interpStyleLocked 0
<span style="color:#00ff00;">                  valueOpDeltaAdd
                                _NO_FIG_
                                ball_1
                                Make_Hole
                        deltaAddDelta 1.000000
</span>                 }
                shaderNodeParm Preview_Image_Map_12
                        {
                        name Preview_Image_Map_12
                        initValue 0
                        hidden 1
                        forceLimits 1
                        min 0
                        max 1
                        trackingScale 0.01
                        keys
                                {
                                static  0
                                k  0  0
                                }
                        interpStyleLocked 0
<span style="color:#00ff00;">                  valueOpDeltaAdd
                                _NO_FIG_
                                ball_1
                                Make_Hole
                        deltaAddDelta 1.000000
</span>                 }

As always, les, you make it very clear how it should be done. Thank you. It's amazing how many cool things can be done with Poser that they don't reveal up front. I'd think they 'd want to shout it from the rooftops.

Now if you could come up with a foolproof way to restore superconfirming to a piece of clothing! Your tip about removing :1 from figure and body actor in a CR2 doesn't work for me, and I have some superconforming items straight from the vendor that have the :1 intact. I wish someone could answer this once and for all. But that's OT from this discussion.

I find that super-conforming is quite hard to break, but saving a super conformer back to the Figures palette is one way to break it, and I don't have an answer to that. Once a super conformer is loaded into a scene it is tied to a character with a particular figure number, and will only super-conform to a character with that same figure number hence forwards and forever, short of actually editing the cr2 to restore the original slaving code.

Quote - ...I have some superconforming items straight from the vendor that have the :1 intact.

Load two instances of the same character figure in the same scene, then try to super-conform the clothing to the second  the character loaded. I bet you the super-conform does not work correctly. I bet you it responds to changes in the morphs of the first character, but not changes to morphs in the character it is conformed to. Much of the time, only one character is loaded in a scene, and that character usually uses a number of ":1", so super-conformers with ":1" in the slaving code will probably work much of the time, but not in all circumstances.