While experimenting (which I all I seem to do lately) in Bryce 5 with ambient settings and "fake radiosity" I noticed the following effect. When rendering with True Ambience geometry "picks up" the color of other nearby geometry (like its supposed to) but it picks up the color even from geometry that's transparent. Examine the evidence - the image on the left was rendered with True Ambience OFF. The image on the right with True Ambience ON. (the diffusion and ambience settings are listed). Everything looks fine on the left, but on the right there is a hard-edged dark area along the face and neck that roughly corresponds to the transparent geometry of the Kozaburo hair (I checked). The geometry itself *is* transparent but the face and neck are picking up the effects of its proximity none-the-less... Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a solvable problem, or a bug-report-to-be to Corel? The images have no lights, btw, other than the pure-white Ambient light setting. TomD

Wow. Look at that! Sorry you're on the other side of the envelope from me at this point. I've been to impatient with the render times so far. But by all means, GO GO GO. Get to the bottom of this! I love stat tests like this. Thanks for posting it.