Well I found out how to fix the earth...remove its weather. I learned an important lesson about Carrara over the last couple of projects. This lesson is that Carrara primitives such as fire, clouds, fog, land, etc are unusable for animations. The above picture was a nice globe that everyone liked, but annoying little black dots kept popping up. The only way I could get it to work was to remove the clouds. In fact I have noticed that you cannot intersect any carrara primitive with a regular model or another primitive or you will generate render errors. This is unfortuante as these tools where what attracted me to Carrara in the first place. I will definately stick with carrara until I try out C2...but I cant recommend this program to anyone until this error is fixed. This is like haveing a Viper and then finding out that its been governed to go no faster than 65mph. Well now that I know this I can at least work around it...anyone have an ideal on how I can get a nice cloud layer? :) BTW: Thanks for looking at the project Mark..it @ least made me feel good knowing that it wasnt something completely obvious....