No it is not self shading... and I found the work around to work perfectly! It is when one sided mesh is used, I believe. It is only on plants with flat single surfaces so to speak.. and it is NOT just the fire fly, or ray trace... I used the plain old poser 4 render, and then fire fly without ray trace, etc.. before I found the work around... it is simply the way that P5 READS and APPLIES the textures... there is a fault in there.. The work around is: 1- Plug the texture into an Alternate Diffuse Node 2- Unplug the texture from default Node 3- set default diffuse Node to a value of 0 and thought it sounds strange, and I am not a programmer, this fix works perfectly - to allow the maps to show up properly no matter what the lighting or render mode is! :) I am a happy camper now. I just hope that P6 (a year later maybe! ;) will allow me to save time and not have to "fix" all the map settings for the plants I use.

Life Requires Assembly and we all know how THAT goes!