Agent Smith, I was playing around with using gelled spotlights with a gradient for exhaust around the time you posted the light pict from the P.S. plugin with that name that's hard for me to remember or shortly thereafter. At first I used the thumbnail for my windmill pict as a gel then started using patterns made in turbocad, although one of the snowflake generators might be good for that too. In conjunction with this I was playing around with that simple black sky you mentioned that you didn't like a while back along with a black ground plane and sunlight turned off with dark gray shadows. The so called space ship which looked more like Buck Rogers Ship or an old V-1 didn't want to show up too well and adding ambience only served to 2d-ify(I know thats not a word) the look of the ship so I never completed the fins and details for it, but I think the flames turned out well. I'm never able to get objects/meshes just as transparent as I want them somehow, so I know that exhaust using terrains would be a trick - if anyone could pull it off though, I imagine you could. Anyrate I guess I was thinking about disturbances on the land surface caused by the exhaust and some cloudy componet to it. Watching shuttle launches over the years I've noticed exhaust clouds are always thicker than imagined when recalled and so transparency might not be the problem I think it is. Streched spheres is pretty much how I've tried to make candles in the past both in Poser and Bryce, but I think I'll try terrain based candle flames one of these times. It sounds interesting anyway. - TJ