I think you've made a good decision, Len, and kudos for thinking it through and not reacting badly to the passions displayed here. I'm pretty excited that you might have overcome the difficulties I was stumped by. The major limitations to True Ambience I couldn't overcome were these: > Mesh surfaces (3d models, not Bryce primitives) lit by True Ambience would not 'smooth'. They always showed faceting, no matter what setting I tried. This meant a potentially perfect 'area' light suitable for beautiful soft lighting of human figures was rendered (ahem) useless. > True Ambience really messed up the appearance of some Bryce boolean combinations. > A surface under True Ambience could only act as a fairly dim source of light, and with abrupt falloff. > Transparent materials had peculiar properties under True Ambient lighting. This lot meant that True Ambience couldn't live up to its potential - and that potential was very high indeed. My explorations led me to believe that the Bryce programmers had developed a giant killing render process, but hadn't had time to incorporate it for release.