Need help getting PSD alpha channels to work with Poser 6

I've been making simple clothing for a while for my own personal purposes and have been wanting to branch out into more complex patterns et al. So, being very familiar with Photoshop and somewhat familiar with Poser (RL art director here, not typically a 3D artist), I have gotten everything to work rather smoothly.... up until I try to get the alpha channel contained in my PSD to register in the materials>advanced dialog in Poser 6!

I've set PoserSurface>DiffuseColor>Image_Map>Image_Mapped to "alpha", figure display style is set to "texture shaded", I actually cmd-R to render... what step am I missing?

Thank you all so much in advance. These forums have been very helpful in guiding me in content creation thus far!

PS I'm on a Mac so I can't use that handy dandy tool stickied at the top of the forum.

Hi Callie. I don't have Poser 6 so I can't say exactly what the problem is, but perhaps I could offer a helpful guess. Have you tried using TGA's instead of PSD's? It's standard for alpha to mean transparency in a TGA, so most programs automatically interpret it that way. PSD's though are much more open ended, and so are far less standardized. Since they can contain an unlimited number of channels, it's not necessarily automatic for the fourth one to mean transparency. Technically, it could mean anything. Most programs that display PSD's will display layer transparency by default, not alpha transparency.

Maybe someone with more Poser-specific knowledge can give some better instructions for using PSD's with it, but in the mean time, give it a try with a TGA, and see if it works. I'll bet it will.

Oh, and make sure you're not using any of those icky Photoshop 7.0 style TGA's. Any other version of Photoshop is fine, just not 7.0. 7.0's TGA saving utility is absolute garbage. The files it creates are incompatible with most other applications. If you've got 7.0, download and install the free 7.0.1 patch before you go any further.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for your response! Unfortunately, following all the previous steps while importing a 32-bit alpha enabled TGA from CS2 did not work as well. Darn these few times I wish I had a PC!

Any other ideas?

As I understand it, you'll have to make three seperate files. One that is a .tga file for importing into SL. But Poser doesn't read .tga files, or if it does, doesn't apply the alpha channel info from them. So you'll need a JPG file of the visible part, for importing into Poser, and will also need a companion file that is the transparency mapping info. You make that by saving the alpha channel from your Photoshop master as a seperate document, then save that as .jpg. Apply the visible .jpg to the diffuse layer, and the alpha channel greyscale image to the transparency layer in Poser.

If you search the forums for "Poser", there is a detailed explanation by Robin Sojurner that takes you step by step through how to use Poser or DAZ|Studio to preview SL clothing.

Thank you Ceera! I had looked at Robin's amazing post and couldn't find the separate files/transparancy layer info, this works!

1 more thing, since everyone's been so helpful :

Poser does import TGAs, just not their alpha channel. So one really only has to make 2 files, the tga and then the alpha channel jpg/tga/whatever. Yay!

Glad to help, Callie. I tend to use DAZ|Studio much more than Poser, though I also own Poser 5. For quite some time I was unable to afford Poser, and DAZ was free, and does pretty much the same thing. I suspect it may be the case that Poser 6 added the ability to use .tga files (minus the alpha info), while DAZ and Poser 5 or lower couldn't. Can't say for sure, as I still can't afford the upgrade to Poser 6.

The big problem is that Poser handles the diffuse later and transparency as two seperate spinners, and so does DAZ|Studio. And for how it handles the transparency, it wants a file with the data that a .tga uses for the alpha channel info.

Another handy trick? Sometimes you may want to set up a master Photoshop file for several types of clothing, with an alpha mask for, as an example, a t-shirt, a Bikini, and a sarong top. But Photoshop will only let you have one Alpha channel, right? Solution: Make an extra layer set, and save extra aplha channels there. You can hide that layer set when you're working, but can copy and paste pre-done alpha-channel layers from there to the actual alpha channel that is active.

*cough* Bootcamp? *cough*

That only works for the shiny new Macs with the Intel chips. I'm still on a "vintage" first-release Mac Mini. There's likely a lot of Mac owners who can't use Bootcamp.

Just did a quick web search as I am interested in this as well. I was about to
add that DAZ suggests using .TIFF files in the opacity area of the surface's
tab which is true. But as I just found out this is not the same for Poser 6.



The rest of the article is Here

Yeah, I've definitely held out with my PowerPC G5 until full Intel Mac compatibility comes around for a lot of the programs I use for RL work, and we all know VirtualPC can't render 3D.

Infiniview, thanks for that link; I will be trying out PNGs for sure; beats making two files.

Ummm... Poser has been able to show transparency on clothing for a long time.

The thing is.. you have to render the image, and the transparency is very "harsh" for some reason. (I'm not sure it's reading partial transparency correctly.) But if what you want to see is how well things are matching across the seams, it'll do that.

For other uses, you might want to just go to the Demo grid, and upload there to see what stuff actually looks like in SL.

Oh, and PS will let you have lots and lots of Alpha channels. It's SL, using .tga files, that won't. That being said, the workaround mentioned above works fine, although I find it easier to save them as black and transparent layers (as opposed to black and white, which is what you get when you paste an Alpha channel,) so I can command/ctrl click, Save Selection, and Replace the Alpha. Makes it just that tiny bit faster, for me.

Hope this helps.

I'm sure it has; the question I was asking in this post is "how", as I'm fully versed in Photoshop but not so much with Poser.

Thank you for the test grid suggestion; I think I just shocked my neighbor with the Homer Simpson style "Doh" that your advice triggered!

I'm sorry that I wasn't clear.

Just follow the instructions in your Poser manual, the online help, or this thread to load your textures.

Then Render.

You won't be able to see the transparency until you render. When you do, it'll be there.