I might add that you should keep the smoothing turned on in the Render Options because your figure and other objects will benefit from it. You can turn smoothing on/off for each object in your scene on their parameters pallette. Just selct the object that is having problems and uncheck "Smooth Polygons" in the parameters - it looks like your ropes are the problem here. As for the background, in P5 you have a couple of choices: If you use the "Import background picture" then your render needs to have the same height to width proportions (aspect ratio) as the background image. You can crop the image in a paint program to match the adpect ratio of your scene or you can change the aspect ratio of the scene to match your background image. If you don't want to do that, then you should use the background node in your Materials Room to add a picture, and not the Import background picture in the file menu. This will allow you to scale the background picture to fill your scene, or to zoom in on it and move it around to get just the effect you want. The "Auto Fit" option will tile the background to fill your scene rather than leave areas without any image.