Ron, your viaual aids are excellent. Great work. I rendered an image the other day in which the figure's face turned jet black with only the lips and eyebrows showing. It turns out that I had inadvertently loaded the eyelash/eyebrow transparency into the texture area. In a transmap, everything except for the part you want to show is black on the image. It'll turn your face totally black. Well, your figure's face, not yours (LOL). This is why I suggested this above. It looked very strange. The description Shorterbus described at the top of this thread sounds like that. It doesn't mention the "rolling in the fireplace" appearance, when the PPP bump is applied, it says "black." That's why I thought it might be the transmap applied in the texture area, because i accidentaly did this just a few days ago. Melanie