...I've been dealing with this for a while, but what causes it, and how do I keep it from happening?

It seems certain eye surface materials show up black until rendered, but considering the comic book settings depend on a render directly from preview this is a serious pain. It seems every other time I load a figure I need to go and manually tweak the eye surface settings in the material room so that they show up as transparent:

Is there some kind of universal setting that I can tick or un-tick that makes transparent eye surfaces actually preview as transparent?

The only way I've found to fix it, is to remove everything from the eyes, delete all the plugins(simply unplugging them isn't enough, they must be deleted), and setting everything but transparency to zero, and transparency to one:

...now deleting everything within the material(note everything is already unplugged and set to zero):

...is this supposed to work this way, is it a bug, how do I get it to work as expected without manually tweaking everything?

I've never seen that before. It has to be something to do with superfly, about which I know basically zero. It's a feature I just haven't gotten around to playing with, having returned recently to Poser from version 8. Does this happen when you have your materials just running into the standard Poser Surface?

I'd wager its a Superfly typical thing with an elementary solution. The only other thing I can think of is your preview render transparency setting...

In the physical root node, change the transparency mode to Opacity instead of transparency. And uncheck colored transparency.

Deecey posted at 11:35AM Sat, 25 April 2020 - #4387315

In the physical root node, change the transparency mode to Opacity instead of transparency. And uncheck colored transparency.

....thanks, that got it working, I also had to set specular to zero as well.

...is there a way to have everything default to that--short of changing the settings and re-saving all of my models that way?

General preferences/Document/tick Launch to preferred scene/click Set Preferred Scene.

Or create an mt6 I'd imagine.

I should let Deecey answer that. She wrote the book after all. No literally, she did.

Creating an mc6 will only complicate the issue if it is applied to a model with different material zones. Mt5 is a better bet but it would need to be applied for each zone and then there is the problem with texture maps if present.

You're right hborre. He'll have to go in and fix each model individually. Luckily he'll only be dealing with those zones that require transparency. It's something that could be done over time and as required... funny how problems like that can propagate.

I probably shouldn't be offering any suggestions as Superfly is on my to do list. I just purchased D3d's tutorial pdf on the subject, plus there's a wealth of info out there, so I'll be up to speed if I need grain in my renders without having to do it in post lol. And no Displacement.

I'm being a smartass ;)