Poser 5 Blend Node
The Blender Node allows you to mix 2 textures together.
Why do that?
For one thing, you might want to use part of one texture, and part of another. You can either splice the two textures together and save the resulting texture map, or you could make a transparency map to hide the parts of one texture that you don't want to see and then blend the two together. I created a transparency map to hide the parts of the Second Skin that I didn't want. However, I couldn't just apply that transparency map to The GIRL herself - that would simply make those parts of her body disappear entirely, not just the clothing texture over the skin.
In this tutorial, I am going to take the Second Skin texture and blend it with the character's regular skin texture by using a transparency map so the skin shows through in some places.
1) Load a Poser figure - in this case, I used The GIRL with V3 mapping - and apply a texture. I then applied the Second Skin texture so see how it would come out.
Not bad, but the skin, especially around the chest, doesn't look right. Besides, I don't want fishnet, just leather and skin. I took the Second Skin texture and blacked out the areas where there was fishnet. I turned the rest of the map white and saved that as a transparency map.
2) Go to the Material Room.
3) Select a material, such as the neck. Disconnect the Diffuse_Color Node.
4) Create a new node from the Diffuse_Color Node: Math: Blender.
5) Since we want the skin as the underlying texture, it will be our Input 1. Create a new Node from Input 1: 2D Textures: Image_Map. Use the skin texture you want for the body. (I used the Zahra texture for this tutorial.)
6) Input 2 is the texture that will lie on top. Create a new Node from Input 2: 2D Textures: Image_Map. Use the clothing texture you want for the body. I'm using a DAZ Second Skin texture.
7) Now we need to tell Poser how much to mix the two, and how to decide where to apply the second texture (Input 2). We want the leather texture to show all the way in some places, and not all at in other areas. Set the Blending to 1. The Second Skin texture will completely block out the underlying skin texture. Now create a new node for the Blending: 2D Textures: Image_Map. Browse to where you created the transparency map and hit Okay.
8) Go to the Node Options at the top and click on the drop down area to the right. Click on Select All. Go back to the Node Options and hit Copy.
9) Select another material that you need to apply the texture mix to. Go to Node Options and hit Select All. Hit the Delete button. This gets rid of everything at once so you don't have extra, unused nodes floating about. Now go to the Node Options again and hit Paste. Your texture blend will now show up. Do this for all the materials that you need to apply the blend to. If you are going to use this particular mix in multiple images, you might want to save this as a Material in the Material Room.
And here's the final result:
