I would like to create my own materials / appearances based on texture and transparency maps, especially since it looks as tho' Photoworks is on the way out and Photoview will now be the only rendering tool I get.

So anyway, since there is no 'new appearance' button to start from scratch, I thought I'd take a material that almost does what I want and edit that. The 'chain link steel' material seems to have a transparency map and a bump map doing exactly what I want, only I want to make a perforated mesh style steel since modelling hundreds of holes is a pain and really slows things down.

I found the wire_bw and the wire_bump files that appear to be what the appearance uses for it's texture and transparency, created my own versions with a similar naming structure, and then replaced 'wire_bump' with 'mesh_bump' in the surface finish property. However, I cant find where to put the transparency map, so I still get the wire mesh transparency.

Please tell me there is a way to do this!