heyas; thanks for the info there, varian! i saw that they said they couldn't do 'object space,' version materials, so i went to mess around with it some more... this is what i have discovered: when you place your image texture on a terrain (w/o checking object space), it places the picture in the middle, within a 3x3 grid of the picture. so, making the scale 3 makes the center tile take up the whole terrain. now, when you change it to object space mode, you still get a 3x3 tile, BUT instead of the center of the tile being in the center of your terrain, the upper left corner is now the center. what you need to do is set the x and y offset to 1/2 of the pixel size of the image. (ie: a 100x200 image should be offset 50x100.) then do the 3x scaling, and the 180 rolling thing. now, if you want to stretch your terrain, the texture doesn't stretch with it. BUT... if you use the numerical size window, you can type in (or just read) the x and y size of your terrain. then go into the texture and stretch it similarly on the x and/or y scale. for example, if you scale the terrain so it is 1x2(x whatever z is), then go into the texture and set the x scaling so it is 1 (the default) and the y is 2. or whatever you change it to. wohoo! :)