Thanks wabe. Your spot on about those lights - you can essentially have whatever falloff you want - could be handy. In fact, its the lighting (radiosity/GI/... that I'm really interested in what V5i can do) The UI is definitely different to bryce's - V5i's felt a lot more cluttered (until I offed a pile of icons and then it opened up nicely). Next couple of questions - is there a way to merge two scene files together (can it be done through the "open file" dialog? Next question - when you import an externally made object (in this case an incomplete building I've been making), is there any way to change the displayed mesh density? The mesh seems to import fine, its just that in the wireframe mode it appears as a haze of dots rather than a building shaped mesh. The bottom mesh in the above image is from bryce (when you turn the displayed mesh density up a bit in bryce - if you left the displayed mesh density low it looked much like the haze pile of dots) and the 4 image view is how it shows up in V5i. (And is there a downloadable manual for the trial version anywhere?)

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD