Hi Dirk, The easiest thing to do is look at the stock shaders and see how they're put together. The best shaders to "take apart" are the stock Basic Shaders like "Checkers", "Cellular Bump" and "Marble" These shader demonstrate the real fundementals of how the Carrara Shader scheme works. To keep things simple, start by keeping all of your experiments to the color channe alone. Once you begin to understand how things are playing together there, you take what you've learned and start applying it to other branches on the shader tree. Please post back with specific questions if you have any or if you need an example. Mark