That's correct. If you look at the final shader tree I put together, the combination of transparency and reflection add up to something close to 100%. My loose interpretation was that reflection can have a large value. No biggy. As for Raydream vs. Carrara, you are again correct. Raydream would scale the other pertinant values as transparency was changed. That was removed from Carrara to give users more power over the shader engine. The shader tree shown here reproduces the effect of the Raydream transparency mechanism. You simply apply transparency using the slider at the bottom of the tree rather than in the transparency slider in the regular shader. All the other channels are set up as though you have no transparency at all. Color, reflection etc. are set they way you would like them with a non transparent object. One other note, you'll see that I cut back on the color channel extensively by mixing it with black a LOT in the previous post. Great comments! -Kix

-Kix