Apologies if this is old news or just patently obvious :-( A lot of people (myself included) are using P4 backdrop props (nerds, cyclorama, 3d worlds kit etc.) in P5, perhaps more now with the need for an object to pick up the SR2 atmospheic effects. All of these (as P4 props) map their image maps to the diffuse channel when loaded in P5 and rely on light source illumination (often many seperate lights to achieve even illumination) and/or ambience, which washes out the colours. The above image (the scene itself is very much WIP) uses an inverted and remapped sphere and a panoramic map for the background landscape and was previously illuminated in the same way (diffuse lighting and ambience). For this image, however, I disconnected the texture map from the diffuse channel and connected it to the ambient colour channel (ambience level set to 1.0). Hey presto, a nice clear sharp image! Diffuse and specular channels should also be set to black so that existing scene light sources will not affect it. Another advantage, of course, is that any lights that are used solely to illuminate the backgroud prop can now be deleted. Bill

Neato mosquito! --lb

Bill, Good render! Thanks for the info. I'll be playing with this over the weekend.

I may be missing something here, but how is this any different from using the object's ambient value set to white in P4 or ProPack? This is how I "self-illuminate" a backdrop prop in Poser 4.

ronstuff In this case I'm using the texture map itself in the ambient colour channel hence you get a self illuminating image. In the P5 case, the texture map is effectively in the diffuse channel. When you add ambience, it does seem to elevate brightness of the ambient colours to some degree, but also washes the colours substantially. The difference is rather like that between an image projected onto a white screen from a slide or cine-projector (ambient texture map), where the image itself is also the light source, and an image that is painted on a white screen (diffuse channel), but is illumnated by lighting it from the front (seperate spots) or the rear (ambience wash out). Bill