I think i like the setTransparentColor()-idea the most. I think i'll add it. I don't know when the next release will be ready though. My new machine and my dev. environment are fine now, but i thougt it might be a good idea to put some Cyanacrylat glue (no...don't ask how this happened) into my left eye...this makes it quite difficult to see things clear...:cry:
Anyway, normals are used for lighting and backface culling and similar stuff. Every vertex of a Object3D is associated with a normal vector, which is rotated and translated together with the object. When scaling is used, the normals are scaled too...but they shouldn't because they have to be normalized (length==1)...hence the name. So they have to be adjusted afterwards. In 0.84 (and all former versions) this rescaling is buggy. The result is, that the object appears too bright or dark, depending on scaling. 0.85 will fix this.