wow, thanks for the info guys, I forgot how expensive Max is, but I think i'll likely have to just go buy it. It'd solve a lot of problems for me that way. In the meantime, I might go get wings and/or truespace. Also, my rendering computer most likely wont be used online, ever, so I stand less chance of needing the worm patch(my plan is to finish my new computer, for rendering, and then build a cheapo net computer with a decent sized hard drive, so I can download anything I need there, scan it, and only send the safe stuff on to my render computer via cd)