Thank you, Mark!

From your answer I am guessing that there is no better method to NPR setup than trial and error?

A) How would I set up Color Clipping in Carrara? Or were you referring to post processing for the clipping? And when you say "build watercolor shaders" are you referring to some Carrara-assisted shader creation, or just shaders based on watercolor painted textures?

B) That sounds like a brilliant idea! I'll try to see how well it can be implemented.

Other things:

1. I love that Dark Arts Tutorial! I've followed it before when I needed some technical reflections. But here my question was more specific: what settings to use for things like camera position/orientation and render ratio to have a map what would, when imported look correctly scaled for an environment that matches the scene it originated from?

When I import HDRI images, they all work very well for reflections, but when used as backgrounds they often apprea pixelated/distorted/not really space/perspective accurate. So I was wondering what I need to do to prevent that?

2. Ah, thank you! This makes perfect sense.How would I go about preparing the ai files for such import (aside from saving as AIv8)? Do the paths in AI need to follow any rules in order to work for the import? I tried importing a compound path and some of it imported properly, while some parts resulted in a very messed up geometry, and I just don't see a reason why that would happen, because the messed up parts seem no different than the non-messed-up ones...

Another question I always stuggle with is whether there is a way to rotate a crosssection plane in the spline modeler? I think the answer is "no", but I keep wishing it would be "yes"...

Thank you again for your answers!