Alright, I give up. I thought that I could make a ghost like figure just by playing with transparency. But there are always unsightly dark areas where body parts overlap. Does anyone know how to get around this and just have a nice ghostly figure? Like simply a transparent shell. The Poser manual does not seem to cover this problem. Right? Notice in the attached jpg how the areas near the arm pits darken because of the overlap of body parts, and in the chin area (I did't get so far as to make the jaws and eyes transparent, but I know how to do that if I ever get past the present issue.) Is there a way to get around this? I thought I remembered some nice ghostly figures in the gallery, but now I am not sure.

You can minimize the dark areas to some extent by playing around with global illumination (lots of lights) and the Ambient values of the materials.

A different approach (which in my opinion looks better) would be compositing in post. Render the figure normally (without making it transparent) against a blank background, then load the image into a paint program like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop and use its alpha channel to composite it against a new background. By playing with the transparency values of each layer, you can make the figure as ghostly as you like. It gives you better control over the results.

Read this thread for details and illustrations.

To be honest with you I think it looks OK but thats just my opinion, Ron might know.

try rendering it without shadows

I tried to do something similar with Stephanie, but I wanted to make her look like a glass figure. The problem that I had was that no matter how hard I tried I could still see some of the interior of the mouth (tongue, etc.). Brian

you can apply plain black bitmaps as transparency materials to the teeth, tongue, and inner mouth to make them completely invisible, then you wont see these anymore now that i think about it, applying a black and white image of your color texture map into the transparency map slot might help you with your ghost look too.

Best bet is to render it separately and composite the image in post.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=128385&Start=1&Artist=kumo&ByArtist=Yes

i done a similar effect in ice, all i done was select the internal head parts and coloured them black, and set all the ambient highlight ect to whites and pale blues, i could have gone more transparent if i wanted to, also you could try using a darker back groung BEST OF LUCK

Here is a slightly different approach to try in poser. Render the scene without the figure and then load it as a background image. Load figure and set depthcue on and render scene again. Figure should take on a transparent quality. Just for the record, most folks find it easier to do the ghost effect in post using a paint program that allows for layering of one image on top of another to get the transparent effect.

You could also experiment with graduated trans maps - I think your figure opaque at the top and fading to the bottom might be worth trying - Here's one I did with Baument's "mourner" mesh last Halloween.

I've done that in Bryce with transparency settings in the mat lab and found that it was necessary to postwork the armpits and various other mesh overlaps.

Try using "filters" such as "Susan's Fog", transparent spheres,cubes etc. also use the square, make a foggy transparency map for it and place it infront of the subject. I haven't tried this myself but it is where I would start if I were trying this. Hope my off the cuff inferences help. let me know if it does. -bikermouse