There are also a slew of free photo shaders around -- NewTek has some, and many other places. You can google them. As for booleans, the main reason they're not generally smiled upon is because they tend to be buggy in just about any program, aside from Bryce. I think (though I'm no Bryce expert at all) that's because Bryce doesn't really do boolean geometry, but rather does some kind of "this is what it would look like if the sphere had been subtracted from the cube" thing. True boolean geometry stymies even the big packages, but Carrara has certainly come a long way in making the booleans work.... Good luck with Carrara -- it's really an awesome program.