Also... is the texture detail REALLY necessary? A painted texture for skin has less information than one made from a series of photographs. Same for tree bark or beach sand. How much detail does your source have... and how important is it that it be preserved? Texture maps are huge memory hogs, and the bigger they are, the greedier they are for system resources. Let's say that you have a man-in-space wearing a typical puffy white suit and reflective faceplate. You could do that as an all-inclusive 4000X4000 tex map, plus bump map, plus reflection map. Ouch! That is more wasteful than having a full map just to do Vicky's eyelashes! If you mapped him in sections, you could have a 1000X 1000 map plus another bumpmap for the suit... and maybe even smaller, since the wrinkles behind his knees aren't very important. ;^) Then have your separate 1000X1000 map for the head/helmet, plus bump, plus reflection. By bringing the size down to something manageable, you can render the space station with figures all over it doing assembly or repair or experiments... you can have better looking figures... and your computer won't whimper and die. Carolly