Just remember one and all that the mantra of game engines is "Ignore the man behind the curtain". Doom 3 looks utterly fantastic....until you examine the unlit, untextured geometry, and realize how utterly lo res and lacking in detain it truly is. It is all lighting and texture tricks. HL 2 is pretty much the same way, with metatags on the textures that call to the sound engine, for instance. A barrel shape is generic; what it does depends on the texture applied. A rusty one creates a metallic clank; a wooden one an empty thunk. The ones marked explosive have a damage value that when exceeded, triggers the burning animation and the explosion. As for Oblivion....the system that Bethsoft is using is nothing more than instanced billboards once you get a couple of detail levels away from your viewpoint. The system actively swaps true geometry and billboards depending on depth setting. The weather effects animations in the distance are all pregenerated or instanced from the foreground. The actual polycount and shadowmapping load is nowhere near what the scene implies. And that is not a slam. Game engines are gorgeous....but they are also designed to display a precreated set of items and effects, and optimized to handle that. The apps we deal with here are geared more toward creating that content, and eye candy should take back seat to function. There have been a few freeware attempts to convert game engines to the display end of a modeller, and none of them worked. Games are built with one assumption; it will be the only app running, and can eat whatever the OS doesn't. Or at least -I- have never been able to run Doom 3, HL2 and Quake 4 the way I run Poser, Infinite, PBooost2, PSP8, etc.....