Ok,, i read the Materials room section of the manual, and i'm thoroughly confused,

I have several background pictures i want to use as backgrounds in my scenes,, How do i paste them over that flat colour background?

I'm still reading in hopes the light will dawn and it will make sense to me, but if someone would kindly walk me through it step by step, i would appreciate it.

If you have an image editor that will handle layers (such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro) the best way is to save your render in a format such as PSD, PNG or TIF which includes an alpha channel. Then you can composite the render over your background afterwards. If not, your only option is to do File > Import > Background Picture, but be warned that Poser is a bit picky and you may get a pixellated appearance. It works best if you resize the picture to the dimensions of your final render before importing.

Alternatively, you can use a single-sided square, size it appropriately (so that it covers the BG of the scene), and apply the BG image as a 2D-image in the materials room. The biggest drawbacks with this approach are that you have to be careful not to let shadows fall on it, and the pic gets affected by the lighting. (OTOH, the latter effect might be an advantage at times..). An advantage is that you can scale the square to get the best effect, and can also tilt it slightly in (say) the Y-axis to create or counter perspective effects... Cheers, Diolma

Warning: if you use the Firefly rendering engine, the background image gets deformed to a square. The P4 renderer works fine with backgrounds. Firefly can only be used when you have a perfectly square working window with a perfectly square background picture! This is an annoying bug in P5. I've reported it to CL several months ago, but I haven't heard anything from them.