thank you all for your replies,i have been reading other threads as well,i think i'll be patient for another couple of weeks before ordering and i'll keep reading this forum and see if some of the problems for some of you get worked out- i'm doing a sci fi comic,i render backgrounds in bryce and my characters in poser 5 and then composite the image together,i make starship pieces in lightwave,export them as obj to bodypaint r2,texture and uv each piece seperately and then assemble the ship together in bryce,this workflow works well for me,but because of the promised features of vue 4 pro i would like to transplant it into my system instead of bryce, as i would like to be able to export my assembled ships to poser as the alpha channel in the renders would help compositing multiple ships in the one scene(or does vue 4 pro render objects with an alpha channel?)anyway,thanks again for your replies and maybe i will join you all as a user soon cheers! Mal