Thanks, must have missed that interaction as I was away for a couple weeks. That too is why I like these forums, thanks to yours' & everybodys' input. Reason I asked was that I spent about 1 1/2 trying to come up with a shader to accomplish shown on the image at the left side. Nothing worked so I just used my base art (Illustrator, drop shadow with Halo, KPT VectorEffects for beveled type) to make a bump map & applied to my spline model to render the image at right. All the rest of the painting was done in Painter 6 by importing the eps art & using masks, various layering techniques & airbrushing to finish the illustration (I already had the 2D bits & pieces for production). It only took me about 1/3 the time to do that compared to making a special shader. Not only that, I saved considerable rendering time to boot. I did learn that apparently the height feature will not work on bump/depth information & I would have to make the spline model a "real" 3D object with extruded type. I opted to take the "KISS" approach for this project (talking to myself "Keep It Simple Stupid").