Hello, After rummaging around for tutorials, I think Im getting close. Could someone take a look at my uploaded pictures (2 of them) and see where my problem may be? I am using 2.1 demo (once I get this problem solved, I will be 75% persuaded to buy this product). Please disregard the eyelashes and eyes; my only concern is the hair at this point.

Thank you for your time
E

Second picture (render settings), note the hair.

Thanks
E

I has taken me a while to get use to the changes in the shader from RDS 5.5 to Carrara 2 (the jump I made). Looking at it, I'de say you want a value in the highlight (none doesn't mean there is no highlight). Insert a value slider set to zero, and see if that makes it look somewhat right. Then you can incorporate the transparency map (adjusting the brightness, or using it as a mixer for two values), so that the hair will have some highlight, but the part that is transparent won't. EMC

Not exactly expert on this app but it looks to me like you need to: 1. Change shader (above the Opacity Mask) to value instead of None. 2. Uncheck "White is Invisible" on the Opacity Mask. Basically I think you need to make sure that whatever setting you have for opacity and transparency are identical. This is what works for me in the 3.0 beta at least.

It occurred to me earlier today that I hadn't tried rendering v3 in carrara yet so I tried it. Oddly enough I found it easier to work with v3 than with michael.

Anyway here's what it looked like.

And just for fun I decided to try an extreme closeup of just one eye. Looks alright except for the eyebrow.

Great! I got it to work per your setting. Thanks, now about thoes eyes....

Regards,
E

Try deleting the eyeball material. It's too close to the eyewhite for the transparency to work right.

It has to do with the eyeball intersecting with the lens. I read somewhere that you should either scale the eyeball or nudge it away from the lens. The close-up is faboulus. Next opportunity I am going to import and experiment!

Yeah from what I've read/seen, the eyeball does cause some wackiness as does the eyebrow. I did some renders of Mike 2 and ended up just deleting the eyeball or setting all of its properties to none. Didn't seem to have that probelm with Vicky 3 interestingly enough. (You know echo, that last image you posted is actually kinda cool looking in a creepy sort of way. Good to see you got the hair looking right though!) re: closeups...yeah they do look pretty sharp in carrara. I'm sure they'd look great in Poser as well (and I've seen some people do great looking ones) but Poser is much slower on my machine than Carrara, and using a hi res texture will either bring things to a screeching halt or just crash the app outright.

Thanks for all the input. Im trying to figure out the eye thing out. Id like to not use the Grouper tool right now until I can master the basic importing problems out first. Then ill learn the easy way. It may take a couple of weeks, but Im also putting a tutorial together for all this so we can place it in the backroom so that people on my level can figure things out a little easier. (this may take some time as I am using the demo version and I cant save anything, so I have to start from scratch every time.) Im saving now for 3.0, so I should have it by late next month.
Thanks again for all the help and input!
Regards,
E