I have deleted the ground plane out. The Mts. and river valley is object mesh created in Maya and imported into Vue. I believe I have fixed this problem by deleting out the water texture and created a new water texture. My still frame renders seem to be working...so the next step is to render out a sequence. I would like to thank you for your comments and suggestions. You wouldnt happen to know why things are flickering would you or some nice settings in the render options to set for image sequence animations??? If you have some settings that you have tested and know they have nice non-flicker animations let me know so I can start playing around with the render options. Like I said I have tried several different options but still have flickering and sometimes black ghost like objects appear in my final renders. Cheers, Dave