finally figured out how to use alpha channels in blender =/ not intuitive in the least, lol, but was able to follow thru a few tutorials and got the hang of it. while i am really enjoying blender, one huge downside is the lack of presets. youre dependant on blenderkit, and while it has some nice stuff, its not made in a way for people to learn from to get the basics of stuff. water, glass, metal, wood shaders/textures should be standard with any app. also, other than uploading to blenderkit, i havent figured out how to save shader presets for future use =P still, ive came out nice... a little work on the fog, its still to "bounding boxey" for me...