I wanted to share a technique that I've been using to get backgrounds and surfaces to look very three-dimensional. I bet a lot of you already know this, but it could be helpful for those who don't. I use DAZ|Studio, but I'm certain the technique will work in Poser as well. Here are three renders. What I did was create a plane, and then got a photograph of gravel to use as a surface texture. For the three renders, I used identical lighting and the identical camera angle. For the second and the third render, I also used the same photograph as a bump map and as a displacement map. I then dialed up the bump strength and displacement strength to 400%. For the middle render, I set positive bump at 2, and maximum displacement at 2. For the bottom render, positive bump and maximum displacement were both set at 10. You see the results. The gravel comes alive, and sticks out of the surface. You can do this to make long grass, or thick-plush carpets, or to create cracks in the fingernails of a monster (look at the full-sized version of "Beast and the Beauty"), or deep creases in the leathery skin of a dragon ("No Fear of Flying"), or bas- relief on wall carvings (I did this on my "Waiting for the Go Order" render.) For background images, I seldom set a photo as a background. Instead, I'll use the same technique, putting a photo as a texture on a plane, and putting the plane behind my foreground scene, and sizing it appropriately. This lets me make the background look more real, more textured, more three-dimensional. I did this for the background of my "Riders 2: War" render. I hope some of you find this idea useful!