I am in the Boston, MA area, if that helps...

Well, at least I am not crazy and/or stupid. I could not figure out why such a simple thing should be so complicated, but your replies indicate that it is not intuitive. Surprising for Bryce -- which I find to be very straightforward.

Thanks. I will do that. Also, regarding the install of windows, I had the work done at CompUSA and the tech just called and said that he was letting me know that he has to reinstall Windows XP and that I would lose all installed programs and related files.

What is the Studio Maya URL?

Thanks. I think that about covers it.

I have had nothing but problems so far. Not one purchase has gone through without numerous emails back and forth from Cindy. Finally, I spoke with her over the phone and she was able to straighten the sale out, but since then I have had more problems. PayPal is supposedly becoming "automated in a few weeks" (whatever that means). But my last problem was with my AMEX credit card which went through on a previous purchase. I sent them a nasty email yesterday. Received an auto-response email saying that my sale went through. But it didn't.

Bummer. I was afraid of that. But I have got the demo version of Vue4, but I use Poser 5 exclusively. I will have to try some Poser 4 scenes. I do not like the Vue4 interface as much as Bryce, but I suppose I will get used to it.

I did indeed download Kozaburo's various hair packs. I was absolutely shocked that they were for free, because the quality so far exceeds other hair packages that I have paid for (which explains why I could not find his stuff anywhere). And they are so easy to use. And the number of morphs is amazing. I did have some problems with some stray sections of hair when I started spinning the morphing dials, but even so, I can live with a little postwork (and I did get carried away a little though it was my very first render using them). Alien Skin 4000's fur plug-in for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro is amazing even for bad Poser hair as a base. But Koz's base is so good that postwork in pretty trivial.

The problem with the fan probably explains why my AMD went over the edge. My computer room at home is cooled by the air conditioner in the next room. The temp in the computer room is never anywhere near as cool as the other room. And during the day when I am at work, the air conditioner stays off. My computer room was orginally a breezeway between my studio and the rest of the house with sliding glass doors on one side and a bank of three very tall windows which covers pretty much the other side. It gets pretty hot in there during the day even with the air conditioner in the other room on high. PLUS, it sits next to another tower computer. Gee, I guess I had better leave the air conditioning on when I go to work... As far as multiple processors, I am a little unclear how to take advantage of them for Bryce renders. When you speak about Bryce Lightning, as I understand it, you are referring to the program inside Bryce 5 that handles network rendering, not a separate product. If Bryce does not support multiple processors, then the only way to speed up rendering (other than by a super-fast CPU and 1 GIG of memory max) is using multiple machines set up as a render farm (again, using Bryce's internal network rendering software). I am correct in this assumption? Our IT guy told me that the usually the operating system handles the dual processing function and that would not depend on Bryce internally supporting multi-processing in its code. I would like to believe this, but I am skeptical. Taking his view to its extreme would lead one to believe that four or even eight processors on the motherboard would make a difference in rendering time.

Thanks.

But I need to take into account that I am going to be using the Poser renderer which can be REALLY slow also and also there is a possibility that I will also use the Vue 4 renderer. Does that matter? Also, I have had bad experiences with ATHLON chips. I had a motherboard go bad after only 1 year and the shop I brought it to told me that they have had many problems with ATHLON boards and virtually none with the Pentium4-based motherboards.

I just ran into an even more puzzling problem. I successfully rendered the cloth and went back to the Materials room. The Object was cloth-plane and image assigned to it was the correct one. But images in the Materials room do not reflect the image map as before. I just rendered it and it renders fine. When I click on texture source it says none even though the correct file name is there. It this a bug?

It works! Thanks! But I am still hazy about the concept behind the plugs.

So I understand what I am doing, what is the concept behind nodes and plugging them in. I am used to just applying an image and bump map in Bryce to an object and then adjusting things in the various 2D and 3D texture editors. Why should I plug into any one "outlet" (like "diffuse color")?

Oh, I first tried Texture_Coord with UV mapping and it did not work. I tried XY mapping because I ran out of other things to try.