Originally posted by rasta3d > Why am I am getting so much grays, and not enough strong darks and lights? You're getting a lot of grey because the backdrop has a lot of grey. If refractive surfaces don't appear as transparent as they should then you need to check a few things *Under raytracing in the render settings, make sure there are enough refractions being traced, and that your max trace depth can keep up with both the reflections and refraction tracing. Check out my cheesy text version of the MR render settings below Reflections [ 2 ] --|--------- Refractions [ 6 ] --------|---- Max Trace Depth [ 8 ] ----|-------- 8 maximum traces is enough to cover 2 reflection bounces + 6 refractive bounces. Same thing for the Shadows settings, default its set to 2, so shadows will not be calculated through more than 2 surfaces which means you won't be able to see the shadow of an empty glass when looking through the glass. Same thing with the photon tracing settings and Final Gather tracing. Originally posted by rasta3d > Why isn't my gradients nice and smooth? If you look closely, there seems to be something like dithering going on. You're shadows are probably noisy because the samples on your light (s) are too low.