I don't mess much with lights, I use masterful lights created by others-- the default lights suck. Rdna has tons of FS sets, other than that, I use SnowSultan's Pinup lights a great deal-- they are a must for pinups. I con't like global illumination-- too darn many lights to hack through and crash Poser. Bumpmaps are crucial and you can mix and match. I often use Cin's Lilliana bump map on other Vicki's cause it is so very good. Yes, it changes the texture a bit, sometimes that's good idea. Many of the good renders you are seeing are helped along by post work. The minimal postwork I do is to render at 2000 or 3000, usually more or less square, clean up joints and hairllines at the huge size, shrink 500 or so, select face, use unsharp mask, repeat, till it is at the size I want. The softening postwork-- the ones that look like htey glow in the galleries are often done with a variatio of this technique-- you need a paint proggie with layers to do it. When you are at the size you want, duplicate layer, set at screen merge mode, play with the transparency [I use from 30 to 50%], Duplicate that layer, change to Soft color or overlay mode, play with transparency until you like the results. That second layer restores the three dimensionality of your main figure or figures while keeping the depth of field gained by the slow shrinking of the pict and the blurring of everything but the face. Emily