Originally posted by ben hobden when you say render stuff out in layers, do you mean that you can render say, just the floor, and all the computing power will go into just that, and then say, the background, the paint effects etc all seperately... Yes. If its not in the layer it won't be considered, sooo don't forget about your lights and such :x. You can even customize the render settings per layer. Originally posted by ben hobden ...Do all renders automatically have an aplha channel? By default that is enabled, of course you can specify otherwise. Though, if you render out to something like jpeg or bmp then you're stuck because those formats only store rgb data.