Thanks for the kind words Clint :) Hi Keithw, Man, you've started thinking about some stuff at the tip of the "ice berg" so to speak. Any of the functions in the Carrara shaders that has a black and white component is fair game for transparency: Slope, ripples, mandelbrot sets, psychedlic patterns etc. Within the transparency channel itself you can mix, add, subtract or multiply various parts of those together too. Want to try some really cool stuff? On a complex shader, try dragging/duplicating the entire multichannel mixer to the transparency channel and replace the color component with black or white. There aren't enough hours in the day..... :) Mark