The standard way of doing the first is to render the scene, paste that to the background, hide the figures and save a temp library entry. Move the resulting small .rsr (.png if you're on the Pro-Pack) to the the real library entry. The second isn't going to happen if you mean having it look like it would in a rendered image. You can use the Display > Document option 'textured' (something like that anyway, it's the last item on the list) to show the figures with a fairly grainy example of the figures texture. There's no way around the transparency issue except to turn the settings down till you actually render the figure. As to the addenda, I'm not certain what you're asking about here. Aren't all the library items boxes?