So to continue with my newbie dumb question mode..... can you tell us how you get the object to reveal reflections of the background? This is all great stuff Baginsbill, I'm learning lots! I'm working on a scene with a big honking chrome harley sitting in front of a complex wall. I'd like to get some reflection of the wall on the cycle.

Ahh, thank you again Acadia and gang for bearing with me and proding excellent ideas. I'll check out the RDNA materials for sure because I'm such a ditz in materials room that if something works, and it's free, I'll go for it as opposed to endless plodding connecting nodes that I have no frigging idea of why I am doing so :-) I did get the chrome to work with the nodes method. despite the lack of gradient bump connection so seemed to not be needed.

Baginsbill
I bumped the min shading rate to .2 on a render last night and was totally blown away at what a sharper and more detailed image it produced! Thanks for the great tip.

So I tried the background load following Acadia's final modifications. It certainly does give you control over the background and a totally different shadow affect... or lack thereof. Worth while playing with for sure.
One thing I noticed however was a signicant drop in the resolution of the backdrop. I attach here side by side images. There is a slight difference in placement of background between the two but I am sure that is not the issue. Perhaps a lighting tweak. This was just a 15 minute knock off excercise.

Dear Bagginsbill and Acadia:
wow, thanks for all the effort you two put into resolving this issue. I'll certainly give it a whorl in the future. Acadia, very kind regards for the very detailed answer that kicked this off. I really appreciate that you took the time to answer my question in line by line detail. These seems like a great method to gain control of background images. It's this type of effort that really makes me appreciate the great community here at Renderosity.

Bagginsbill, despite my bit of a blow off on you it turns out that you did address the nub of my question. When I doubled checked my render settings I realized that at some point in time I had set my default to always render to screen size. When I switched it off I got the background image to load. Thank you so much because it allowed me to easily load up a background to finish off a picture that I hope to load tonight, one that I had about given up on.

Again, thanks to both of you for going beyond the call.

Acadia:
Thanks for the detailed response, it sounds like exactly what I am looking to do. But I am a materials room idiot. Would it be possible to provide a screen capture showing your set up as described?
The background is Spooky Backgrounds 3. It has many excellent pics.

Baginsbill,
that sounds like a good answer but that image had no render dimensions specified. I loaded an empty screen, added V3 and then imported the background. Thats it. Never went to the render settings to set a dimension.

You just gave me a possible fix on my manual load problem in Poser under vista .

Excuse the newbie question but Vista is completely new to me.
So can you please tell me how I release the security in the runtime folder?

So far I have right clicked poser in startup, gone to properties and made sure that admin and all users have full access. But how do I do this for the runtime folder itself? Please assume that I am completely daft at how to do this and how to navigate in Vista because I still am.

Many thanks for your quick response, it sounds promising.
brewgirlca

ok, a friend told me to check how I logged on and I find that I am logged on as the Administrator. So I am supposed to have full control over my files and yet the program tells me I need permission!
Vista is a pain in the ASS!

Wow, thanks for the rapid response and great advise. I got Poser to load no problem but now I cannot manually install files into Poser 7directory. So my post of today if you think you can help. It follows:

Wow. thanks to all you people who answered my question about loading poser into Vista. It worked just fine. Excellent article on 99 tips for vista!!
So I loaded poser but put it into the program directory because it seemed that once I had freed User Account Control the programs would load. This may have been a big mistake because now I cannot manually install several programs.
So I have two big and related questions:

1. I have to manually load several zip packages into poser 7. In windows xp all I had to do was unzip the folders into the Poser 7 directory and it loaded them. But in Vista it will not extract the files when I do that. How can I make vista extract those files?
   I have already turned off User Account Control, which I needed to do to load poser.

2. How do I give users Roxanne PC full control?
   How do I sign on to be the administrator?
   e.g. when I try to delete a folder with runtime files that did not load properly from Poser 7, it tells me I need permission to do so. I have tried to set the security settings so that users have full control but it won't let me affect that - I get a blank form to fill in saying "enter object name to select" What is that? or it tells me that user Roxanne has full control but says properties not inherited from anywhere.

I am not sure that I can just delete poser and start over loading poser into the base directory because it seems as a user I don't have the authority to remove the program