Hi. First of all thank you to everyone who has been replying to my posts. I really appreciate all the help. I am working on a complex animation for the dvd of this year's school play. I have been doing some animation tests with ocean waves and have begun constructing the island that will be seen in the opening animation. The island has 69 palm trees and the test render I did took over 15 hours to render with really good light settings at 640 X 480. Now if it was just one image 15 hours would be acceptable, but the animation resolution will be high def quality 1080 x some number I can't remember at the moment, and once I add in the water, the pirates, the boats and messages in bottles floating in the ocean, I know that the render times are going to increase. Now comes the first of my questions: 1) In Bryce it was possible to render out an image (lets say a Palm tree) and projected it onto a 2D plane, which with the added transparency mask, could render a highly detailed palm tree in under a minute. I know that I can insert a 2d plane, but can I project my image of a palm tree onto it, and if so how? And will the image be able to cast a palm tree shadow? I figure that this alone will decrease render times, although i was hoping to have the palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze, but I don't think Carrara can do this.... 2) I asked something simular to this in another thread but perhaps phrased the question wrong. If I create a Poser animation and import it into carrara 5 pro can I loop the Poser animation and still animate the camera around it? Such as having pirates sword fighting over a chest of treasure. 3) If I create an animation in Carrara such as the ocean waves moving or smaller waves lapping up against the shore can I get these animations to loop, or do I have to animate these sections only as they appear on camera. I mean when I create my scene can I set up my waves ahead of time and have them loop continiously until the camera moves onto them and past them in the animation? 4) I created a really nice sky in Bryce. I have imported it as a backdrop but it looks odd. If I create a sky is there away to project it onto a skydome, or make it look more like a sky and less like a backdrop? The sky is the one thing I don't plan on animating. I'm planning to render the animation in one big 2-3 minute animation on Carrara, but is it better to render it out as a movie or can I render it out in an image sequence so that if I have to do post processing (colour correction) I can. Thank you for all the help and advice. Sincerely, David