heyas; okay, i grabbed the background in the material room, and i stuck some blue and white cloud shader on it, and plugged it all in, blah blah blah. and whatever render settings i use, the blasted background keeps coming out plain flat grey! argh! i got p4 with anti-alias, texture, bump, shadows on, and 'ignore shader trees' off. or p5 with the usual simple stuff turned on. AND the background thing that says 'use current background shader.' AND i checked, and the blue and white cloud thingy is still plugged in! argh!