i figured it out while playing with the proggie.....the reason why no matter what i did i couldnt get the transparency to work was because of one and only one thing---IN THE RENDER PROPERTIES THERE IS THIS OPTION CALLED "LIGHT THROUGH TRANSPARENCY" AND FOR SOME ODD REASON THAT IS BY DEFAULT UNCHECKED!! if light cant pass through then you cant see whats on the other side! you would figure that would be checked by DEFAULT cause what would be the point in using a transparency in the first place if light by default cant pass through??? this was a problem i tried to work out for days! and i discovered the solution by accident!! i tried all the advice you guys gave but the thing wouldnt become transparent!!!!!! anyway, i learned some things while playing around with the settings!! 1. CARRARA 2.0 RENDERING ABILITY IS BY FAR SUPERIOR TO FIREFLY!! you can still get a pretty good looking render with only a simple bulb and a figure with a lo-res texture!! it appears to me that the render engine enhances everything. 2. anti-aliasing of Poser 5 is better-----you can still see jagged edges even after setting anti-aliasing to BEST in Carrara. the same figure rendered in FireFly is more smoothed out. 3. i must have rendered 30 or so times in one session of Carrara with very high-quality render settings without the program hanging up, unlike in Poser 5 where after 5 renders the software hangs up. in both programs my actual computer didnt hang up. 4. adding a bump map or any bump to a figure is pretty complicated... this is my next problem...will figure out next. 5. did i mention the render engine in Carrara is way better than Poser 5? =)