Me too I'm a cooking/cleaning guy! But maybe that's because I work at home... gotta ask better about that, now that I think of it... @danamo: your guess is right, it's something to prevent burglars from entering in low balconies or windows. @pogmahone: Yes, that was the thing that fascinated me most, the walls. I tried to replicate them with procedurals. Frankly, I did it only for training purposes: I still prefer to use photographic textures when the goal is realism. @vasquez: I missed the yellow-orange ambience, sigh, and I know it. I spent hours trying to achieve just that, but the blue-channel in the HDR image I used to light the scene kept entering the picture. Once I got rid of that, nothing seemed to work to give that yellowish sunshine feeling. :( Of course, I have still many ways to go with Maya, but the Docs and the manual lack a lot in the MentalRay department. By the way, if someone of you stumbled upon a Mental Ray specific site in the past, I'd be very happy to have the link :) Generally speaking, Sicily is very clean. Much more than Italian metropolissss (what's the plural? metropolises?) like Naples or Turin or Milan (where I live). A big thank you to all the girls out there, even to those that don't care zilch about cleaning :) S.