I've just started to use carrara 1.1 (freebie from a mag.) If I export a textured and clothed figure from Poser 5 and open in carrara then render I find that the body texture comes out fine but anything transparent like hair, eyebrows clothing etc. renders like plastic, i.e. no texture or transparency. What am I missing? Please help a newbie! Thanks People.

Sounds like a trip to the Texture Room is needed. It looks like Carrara did not build a shader tree with a layers list; a seperate multi-channel shader for each material in your import. I seem to recall Carrara has some trouble looking past the first directory it finds a texture map in, so you may need to instruct it where the clothing and hair maps are located. You are going to spend a little time with the manual here; the Texture Room is pretty simple once you get the hang of it but it isn't something I care to instruct about in a single post. Another option is to try different import options. I seem to recall that "as vertex primitive, create a single polymesh, create only one object" worked very nicely for bringing a Poser character into Carrara 3 demo.

Attached Link: http://www.castironflamingo.com/tutorial/index.html

I don't have Poser 5 so I don't know how P5 sets transparency, or if it's any more Carrara-friendly than P4 was. But this question has been asked so many times here that I keep hoping somebody will write a tutorial on it that we can post in the Carrara back room, one that doesn't involve Grouper (no Mac OS version). See attached link for Grouper tutorial, and also see the following forum messages:

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1206677
http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1198827
http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=546882

Thanks for the help guys' it's much appreciated.

Right. I forgot about the Grouper thread. But if I recall correctly, there were a few of us experiencing a painless import using the options I mentioned above. (P4 to C3, Mac OS 9+) So I'd give it a try....oh; to make even more sure, pull the object, mtl, and the texture maps together into a single folder and import from there.

Thanks nomuse i'll give that a try.