After a frustrating experience trying to get my DAZ mermaid tail to display correctly I came to appreciate what another poster meant when they said (to paraphrase) "Carrara models transparency true to physics and poser more intuitively." Being a recent convert from Bryce, I was more of the intuitive school of thought. An hour of frustration set me right ;-) I poked around the archives for a solution to how to get carrara to treat transparency more like Poser (since that was what was needed to get my Daz tail to work right on my mermaid.) Since I didn't come across a solution in my searches, I'll post mine here although if there was a previous discussion on this, I wouldn't mind a pointer to it in case there is another way to deal with it. (I found only one previous thread but with no solution.) Anyway, my solution was to use the opacity mask in the layers channel. What worked for me was to set the topmost, root layer as all black and 100% transparent, then to add another layer that was "coverall" with color and bump as normal (in this case, the DAZ color and bump maps), transparency to value 0 (very important) and the opacity to a texture which was the DAZ transparency map. The shader is attached with the texture maps closed to get it to fit on one screen. Now my only problem is that my 100% transparent portion of my objects cast shadows, even with the caustic renderer (any suggestions?) Setting my mermaid tail to not cast shadows is okay against the mermaid's body but the tail should cast shadows against other things (in this case, a ship's hull as she is a figurehead). Any rumor of a poser to carrara plugin to speed the transition? I've heard of one for 3ds max, IIRC. Thanks, Marc