What you're taking about here is 2 different types of smoothing - Smooth Surface Subdivisions, which adds polygons and "curve" them along the existing curve and a renderer trick called smooth normals. Bryce, as well as most 3D (except Poser), uses this render trick. Without normals, illumination that is parallel to the plane of the polygon gets zero illumination and illumination that is perpendicular to the poly gets max illumination. If you plot angle vs illumination, you get a straight line and that's what makes a low poly count object look faceted. A normals list looks at the whole surface and tricks the renderer by making the angel vs illumination graph a curve instead of a line. This gives a smooth effect that lets you use about half the number of polygons to create a smooth looking surface. The problem is that normals do not effect shadows (both cast and received) and for some angles there is no realistic normals smoothing solution. That's what the smoothing angle in Bryce is for - it does not control how "round" an object is but the threshold where Bryce stops smoothing. The default of 85 degrees means anything over 85 does not get smoothed. This means that you don't get smoothing on the 90 degree angles of a cube (for which there's no good normals solution anyway). In many cases (like inorganic models) you may want to set the angle to less then 45 degrees so that 45 degree angles are "crisp". While the .OBJ format can (and usually does) support a normals list, 3DS and DXF do not. Bryce doesn't convert imported objects to smooth surfaces but it does triangulate square polygons and then recalculates the normals - which sometimes causes the object to look different then in it's original quadratic form. So if you're modeling an object for Bryce, triangulating the object in your modeler will not only look more like it will in Bryce but it will also greatly speed up import times. HTH; Dan