Requires Poser and a photo editing program.
Transparency maps, used to hide parts of an mesh, aren't as hard to make as some people think. Make sure the parts you want to hide are pure black, while the parts that should show must be white. If you wants translucency, use a shade of grey. The darker the grey, the more see-through it will be.
That's it.
Then again, making sure you get the right parts hidden, or partially see-through, can take some effort. Here are my tricks for making it easier.
Load the mesh in Poser. If it's clothing, then conform it to the proper figure. In my example, I'm using the DAZ Fantasy Dress with V3.
1) Turn the item white and load the texture template as the texture. This will give you a nice grid so you can figure out where to "chop off" (hide) the skirt.
2) Now, I wasn't quite sure where to cut off the skirt, so I made it partially invisible by setting the Transparency to .5 and the Transparency Falloff to 0.
3) After that, I just counted the number of rows down I needed to go in order to cut the skirt off at the right location.
1) Load the texture template.
2) Create a new layer and name it "Transparency Layer." (Or something equally original and clever.)
3) Fill the new layer with white.
4) Reduce the layer's opacity to about 40%. You want to be able to see through the layer to the underlying template.
5) Count down the rows on the skirt until you hit the correct row. Black out everything past that point. You'll want to follow the curve of the row. (This is why pen tablets are wonderful!) I also use eliptical and rectangular marques rotated at crazy angles to keep my brush strokes even.
6) Change the transparency layer opacity to 100% and save it as a .jpg file. I name mine trans-test1.jpg.
Hint: Don't use the final name of the transparency map for your test. If you're doing multiple transparency maps for one mesh in one session, it saves a lot of time if you keep saving the current test under the same name. This way, when you need to test the map in Poser, you don't have to load a new map before rendering.
1) Load the transparency map in Poser, set the transparency to 1, and render. This will will let you know if you're close to the length you want.
2) Tweak the length in Photoshop. Save the .jpg under the same test name as before.
3) Render again in Poser.
4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 until the length is correct.
(Yes, I put pants on V3 while testing the mini. It was
easier to see the contrast. And I got tired of feeling like I was a pervert
looking up her skirt!)
5) In Poser, remove the texture template for the skirt texture and now render it again. Look at the front of the skirt, the sides, and the back to make sure that they appear even.
Hint: an easy way to do that is to change the camera's YOrbit to 0, 90, 180, and 270 to get good views of the Front, Right, Back, and Left sides respectively.
6) It's common that the sides will not quite match up due to the seams. You'll need to hand tweak at the edges until they match up.
7) When you're happy with the results, save them under their final name.
8) Now go and be transparent!
Yep, gotta love the sexy stocking and mini skirt look!
