Want to shorten a skirt, make a plunging neckline, or remove part of an outfit the easy way? Transparencies are the way to go!
If you want to cut out a portion of an item, such as make a plunging neckline, then here's how to do it:
| Vicki is feeling pretty daring in a skin tight suit, but she wants to go full out and really show off her diet/exercise program. |  |
| Take the existing texture. Save it under a new name. In this case, I took the catsuit template. |  |
| Paint in absolute black whatever you want to cut out. (RBG 0/0/0, CMYK 0/0/0/100.) Paint the entire rest of the texture absolute white. (RBG 255/255/255, CMYK 0/0/0/0) This shows the neck in the front and back of the suit cut out. Thrilling, huh? Save the texture again. |
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| Hint: Use multiple layers to make your transparency map. If I wanted to make a lacey neck frill on the catsuit, I'd create one layer and paint the neck area black. I'd create a layer on top of the for the lace and paint the lace portions in white. (Or grey if the lace is rather gauzy.) When I was satisfied with the detail, I'd create a layer *below* the black area and flood fill it with white. This will turn the rest of the texture completely visible so you don't have to worry about bleed-through. It also makes it easier to do refinements as you can simply add to, or subtract from, the black and lace areas. | |
| In Poser, load the figure and the clothing. Go to Render: Materials, select the clothing item and set the "Texture changes apply to entire figure" checkbox. Set the following parameters:
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| The clothing item will have turned into dots (in most viewing modes.) Now go and Render your figure. Please note: You may need to tweak the transparency map to get the seams between the front and the back to perfectly match up. It's as much an art as a science. |
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If you want to get rid of an entire material at once, not just cut out part of it, you can get rid of it without using a transmaps at all. (Some clothing objects have a sleeves material, for example. If you want sleeveless, just turn the entire material invisible.)
To do this, in Poser 4 or Poser Pro Pack, simply set the Object Color White, and the Highlight, Ambient, and Reflective Colors black. Set the Highlight Size to 0, the Transparency Min and Max to 100, and the Transparency Falloff to 0 for that material. In Poser 5, set the Diffuse_Color to White, Specular_Value and Ambient_Color to Black. Set the Highlight _Size to 0. Transparency, Transparency_Edge, and Transparency_Falloff Edge should be set to 0.
If you're comfortable with MAT files, you can make a MAT file to create the transparencies for you. The settings are on Page 3 of my MAT tutorials.
