Hi Max, I'll give you a cautious answser of yes because I'm not sure that I fully understand your shader question without seeing an example. Being able to select "local" or "global" coordinants is available in Carrara2 as well as Carrara3. It simple is dependent on how you set up your shader tree.There are actually a bunch of ways to accomplish that in Carrara2 and even more in C3. Now for your other question: Something that you can do in C3 and currently C2 IS work on a group of objects separatly. That's a very important function to me too. Any group of objects can be double-clicked on and will open up as a group by themselves in an assembly room window. After editing the group, a small button at the top of the assembly room window will read, "Jump Out". Selecting that button will let you leave the group and rejoin the total scene with your group in place. As a matter of fact, one of my model building tricks is to have groups within groups for easy editing of components. Even a single object can be designated as a group! They only thing that I wish was different would be how the Area Renders functions. Currently, if you're editing a group and do an Area Render on the group, you actually get the full scene in the render. It would be nice if only the group you were working on was rendered. Hope that this clears some things up.