Well, I bought Poser4 and Pro Pack, arrived on the 1st, so that means I've been posing for about six days now. :) (All pictures came out looking like total crap). Read the damn manual, twice, but there isn't that much information on these things. So, could someone please explain them, or post links to good tutorials that provide you with some useful information. I think I know some stuff about the Bump maps and how they work from Bryce, but the rest are a total mystery. And, what do you need (to know) in order to create your own textures? Thanks.

Instead of 'Transparency' I meant Bump.

The bump maps and the transparency maps act like shaders and transparencies in Bryce. The bumps just "bump" up the surface a little (WARNING: MEMORY HOG ACTION), and the transparencies "cut off" any part of the texture you don't want to see. Head for the Tutorials here on R'sity; they're pretty good.

Texture - the colors on an object. Transparency - the areas that let light through. Bump - the raised areas on an object. Reflection - the reflected picture. There are tutorials on how to make the different maps. I'm just going to explain why you use them, not how to do so. Suppose you had a sword with a leather hilt and a very shiny blade. Texture map: The color of the hilt is determined by the texture map. The graininess of the leather would be created with either a bump map or the texture map. (If there is just a bit of graininess, you might as well do highlights and shadows on the texture map itself. If there are major raised areas and depressions, you'd use a bump map.) Transparency map: If the blade is supposed to be serrated, you might use a transparency map to hide bits of the sword edge to create the serrated look. People use transmaps all the time to turn a solid shirt into a lacy construct by hiding bits of the shirt, creating a lacy effect. You can shorten skirts by turning the bottom of the skirt transparent with a transparency map. Bump map: As I said earlier, if the hilt is very bumpy, you might use the bump map to create the bumps. Another possibility is to use a bump map to create runes on the sword. Why do this? Because the more detail in the model itself, the more polygons. More polygons = larger file size = program gets really slow or crashes. Bump maps fake extra detail. Reflection map: if the blade is very shiny, it will show what is around it - like a mirror. A reflection map is just a picture of what reflects off of the surface. (Think of all the car commercials where you see the shiny chrome. If you look carefully at the chrome, you'll see the background reflected by the chrome.) Hope it helps.

Very clear explanation. I've been using Poser for 2 years and never understood the bump map; because of your clarity, I now see that creating bump maps can solve one of my perpetual problems. I often need to make small ins and outs on the surface of something like an electronic device, to look like bezels and buttons; I was using Amorphium to make those, but that made it difficult to get "registration" between the colors and the surface shapes. Altering the coloring texture into a bump map solves that problem automatically.

Thank you, that did help a lot. I pretty much understand them now. Very clear. Clear and concise. :) And yeah, I did check out a few tutorials, but the fact that I can't draw 2D to save my life, doesn't help. So it could be some time before I make my own textures.

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Don't get too wrapped around the axel about creating your own textures, etc. There's plenty of freestuff to keep you going. I'm not that good at 2D either but find it not too difficult to modify an existing one if I need to, and in the process, learn more.