The key to IBL is not mentioned in any documentation I have seen. It is practically useless unless you include an input of some sort to the color channel in materials. This is because the default "material" is pure white, so a "naked" IBL is a blast of pure white light coming at your model from every direction. If you don't happen to have a mirrorball picture handy, it's less than useful. And I've found that the intensity needs to be dropped closer to 20% than 65% to avoid washing out details. At the risk of being a curmudgeon, I confess I haven't found much to cheer over in the IBL system. The discrepancy between what the preview shows and what you get is even more radical than with spotlights, and render times climb into the stratosphere, so it's even more fumbling in the dark than "the old days." And generally I can get as satisfactory an image with classic 3-spot lighting, without the grief. Oliver's tutorial is great, but once I had used it to create lights for a scene, I compared the results to what I was getting the old way. It may be butter and margarine to some folks, but for me it's "No deeference!" Well, the difference that it took the better part of three hours to get something approaching satisfactory light saturation. Another potential problem I've encountered involves "real skin." As DeeCey says in Practical Poser, "Translucence" is just "Alternate Ambience," and therein lies a problem when I apply Translucence to brighten up a skin tone. Typically, translucence washes out detail; more subtly than Ambience, but for the same reason. That translucent glow turns into a lovely inner light if I backlight a figure. Fact is, people aren't translucent. We have this opaque layer a few millimeters below the fur, and meshes don't. What's worse, Poser is likely to become unstable with this much going on, and suddenly things go --to use the technical phrase-- totally wacko. For example, while trying to repair the Translucence problem a few hours ago, I eventually deleted every node for a V3 head material except the image map, and the result was a black head shader unless I moved the map to the AltDiffuse node. And yes, I had all the fundamental root nodes defaulted at that point. And the head continued to be translucent with Translucence OFF when I moved the imagemap to Alt Diffuse. I just spent nearly four hours fighting with the combination of IBL and "real skin." Then I switched over to Carrara 5 Pro and starting from scratch with new cameras and lights, it took a half hour to get a satisfactory setup, including render time, and including ten minutes of diddling with the shaders to get rid of the oiled skin look I inherited from the Poser file's "translucence." Carrara renders at 10 times the speed of P6 and more. The only downside is the hassles of fumbling with shaders, which do not port very conveniently (you get most of them, but assigned to nameless materials and with their relationships a bit murky). And because the materials aren't ported, you have to kind of guess which shader is which if you want to modify them. Personally, I hope Poser 7 will come with some fundamental fixes to perennial problems, like render times, instead of a new set of glittery toys. M