I've been struggling with illuminating the planet/moons backdrop without disturbing the other lighting. Any ideas?

Try two separate renders. You could then easily light the backdrop without affecting the rest of the pic.

Coppula eam se non posit acceptera jocularum.

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In Poser 5 try plugging the texture into the Ambient_Color node instead of the Diffuse_Color node (set Ambient_Color to white and Ambient_Value to 1). In Poser 4 you can try playing around with the Ambient Color. Or you can add the background in postwork. Saving you render in PSD or TIF formats will also save an alpha channel that will be useful for merging your render with the background image. Or just load the image as a background (but your background image will be scale to fit the current display size in Poser and stays that size even if you render to a new window). Chris Cox

Chris Cox

Yep the ambient material would be the way to go here. also I would take a look at any light pointing directly at the gal in relation to the camera you plan on doing the render from. I would set that light to cast no shadow. that way she can be lit from the front but the shadow will not cast on the back drop.

Great job on the glass. Tricky to achieve just the right mixture of transparency and reflectivity, isn't it?

Thanks! Plugging the texture into the ambient node did the trick. I played with the ambient node a good deal but didn't think to plug the texture into it. Yeah LD. The glass was a bear too. I'm saving it in materials so I won't have to go through that again! :-)