Hey everybody, just thought I'd post a solution to a problem I was having with mixing materials that started out as basic materials, the solution was actually provided by Steve in the Beta Forums recently but it's important enough I think to get the word out. All the "basic" materials that come pre-loaded with Vue 5 have animation applied to them when they shouldn't, this was causing a material to not react or to react badly to being mixed with other materials. All you have to do to correct this is follow the following steps: 1) Apply each of the "basic" materials (or any others for that matter that this might happen on) and click on the timeline icon, (see the attached screenshot for what step 2 looks like) 2) In the timeline, expand the "properties" and delete any keyframes that are attached to the material by right-clicking and selecting "delete keyframe". 3) right click on the material after deleting the keyframe and save it back to the directory Vue automatically loads it from <(c:program filese-onsoftwarevue 5 espritmaterialsbasic> in this case. 4) voila! all done, your material is no longer screwed up. Hope this helps, I normally don't even use the basic materials but I was using them to check material boundaries on some objects and blending bands and noticed I couldn't edit the transparency or reflection of the material that started out as an animated one.