I actually posted my reasons a couple of days ago but here are the main one's again. The same materials used on the same objects using the same settings will not always produce the same results. More than 2 materials onscreen and the Material Editor starts to stutter and slows down to snailpace. Gave the Metablob thing a try, 2 cylinders, 290 polygons, rendertime 8+ minutes in preview mode. AMD XP3000 - 1280Mb Mem - ATi9600XT - Ton and a half of space where needed.