(I have not seen this technique suggested before, apologies if it is merely obvious.) Here is a way to get a layered hair effect from the many hair models that are already available. Start with the OBJ of the hair. Import it into Poser serially, with each instance at a slightly reduced scale. Export the combined layers as a single OBJ. The advantage: the same or different texture, bump, and transparency maps can be applied to each layer. An interesting effect can be obtained by just varying the color, highlight color/size, and transparency of each layer. The disadvantage: the size of the mesh. I am willing to elaborate on what I have done if such is requested. By the way, does anyone know the proper switches to get Poser-post 118 to put all of the v's, vt's, vn's, and f's of the several groups together, instead of serially. Pre-patch, Poser 4 seemed to do it that way, there are now more choices on export, but I do not understand the differences in the choices. In my hands, MSWord scrolls like windshield wipers on high, so the cut/paste was a real joy. Jaager

I've seen and downloaded this technique once before but have not played with it as yet. The site was Japanese and the tutorial was not thoroughly clear. Have you tried this personally, and can you verify the results are good?

I did it with the "Monica" hair style. It worked for me. I made it 4 layers, 100, 98.5, 97 and 96 %'s. I reversed the normals on 96% so that as not look out thru the hair at the back of the neck. I cleaned out the junk polys on the inside using RDS before I started. It is 3.5M so there is a 1-2 sec action-reaction response in Poser. I am beginning to suspect that a texture map, no matter how good will not yield a desired effect. However I think that a good bump map will work wonders. A kludgy experiment shows that one will really breakup the plastic surface effect, its just that alternating stripes between 0,0,0 and 255,255,255 do not produce a realistic effect.

Sounds cool. Now here is an idea I have been knocking around in my head but have not had time to play with. What if we took something like the cloth prop, only modified it a bit so that it would fit to the head, and used hair texture, bump, and trans maps on it, and then layered them? Have no idea if this would work, just keep meaning to try and never seem to get around to it. Rob

That seems to be about what Kosoboro et al. did. Not a single sheet, but thirds or quarters so that the map would be more flat. But what they call layers, I would term as segments. If they have also done layers, I can see why they have not posted it. It would eat up bandwidth to D/L it. Unless cable modems or DSL(?) becomes universal, this may have to be a kit: one layer and a page of directions. BTW, I used streaky/noisy trans maps of decreasing intensity and got intersting highlight effects.

Yes, I remember Allerleirauh suggesting this method quite a while ago but with 2 layers, one scaled down. Jaager, If you get a pretty good result from your methods, could you post a pic?

I have no Web site.