I'm using Superfly in Poser 11 Pro, and trying to reproduce something I had going in Firefly, but can't decipher the best way to set up full transparency in the Materials Room. I tried searching the forums (as well as Google) but ended up looking at a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't relevant without finding the actual answer. Can anyone help?

Thanks!

by transparency, I'm assuming you don't mean making the whole material transparent, like hiding the eyebrow prop for v4. That would be done the same way as you would in firefly. For superfly, do this.

The diffuse node can be replaced with your shader. You also need to make sure the transparency color is set to 255, 255, 255. It doesn't load to that, but a light gray instead.

Thanks. In this case, I actually am trying to make the whole thing transparent. It's an old skullcap trick I had because it accomplished things that just unchecking Visible in the Properties tab didn't do. With full transparency on, I use to check Light Emitter and Visible in Raytracing in the Properties tab, and for some reason I could get away with a lot lower hair density without getting a bald scalp. (In PP2014, this did generally result in some artifacts, mind you.)

I'm actually not sure if the trick will work in Superfly, but thought it was worth a shot.

I'll to render to see if it actually works, but I think I figured out the transparency aspect. I was just applying transparency to the skullcap itself, but forgot about applying it to all the material zones. Now it's transparent in preview, at least, so will see what happens....

Either of these should work for that. Just make sure you have superfly checked in which ever root node you want (I often forget that) and, yeah, make sure you do all the materials on the skullcap.

Or using the physical root node. Remember to set spec to zero. Has the advantage if you have a mask it can just be plugged into the Transparency node. Flipping the Opacity setting to Transparency flips the mask.

Hi, I'm going to pile on here, because I think I have a similar question and I've not been able to find the answer yet. In FireFly, for the last thousand years or so, if I wanted to render a single material zone invisible, Transparency = 1.00 and no spec/ambience/etc. did the trick. For example, if the materials on a tree consist of leaf and bark, and you want a wintertime tree, make the leaves transparent and you're there. That clearly does not work with the Poser Surface in SuperFly. In the tree example, I end up with peculiar clumps of black here and there. I've tried different light sets and different types of lighting, so I don't think it's a lighting artifact (or at least, not solely a lighting artifact). I've tried both the Cycles and Physical Surface configurations shown above in this thread... same issue still applies: clumps of black. Something is still getting picked up in the ray trace. Is this impossible to do in SuperFly without eliminating the object's ability to cast shadows? Any thoughts? Thanks!

skoglundmike posted at 10:40AM Thu, 21 September 2017 - #4314486

Hi, I'm going to pile on here, because I think I have a similar question and I've not been able to find the answer yet. In FireFly, for the last thousand years or so, if I wanted to render a single material zone invisible, Transparency = 1.00 and no spec/ambience/etc. did the trick. For example, if the materials on a tree consist of leaf and bark, and you want a wintertime tree, make the leaves transparent and you're there. That clearly does not work with the Poser Surface in SuperFly. In the tree example, I end up with peculiar clumps of black here and there. I've tried different light sets and different types of lighting, so I don't think it's a lighting artifact (or at least, not solely a lighting artifact). I've tried both the Cycles and Physical Surface configurations shown above in this thread... same issue still applies: clumps of black. Something is still getting picked up in the ray trace. Is this impossible to do in SuperFly without eliminating the object's ability to cast shadows? Any thoughts? Thanks!

For Physical root node a couple of things to check. If the transparency map is a image map, make sure the gamma correction is set to 1.0. If using xfrog plants the transparency map can be colour so needs to be converted to black and white (Math step function might help here)

skoglundmike, also in your render settings, check the number in Max Transparent Bounces too, too low a number will result in black where the rays will stop rendering once it hits that number.