Michael/Pieter - Thanks for the info! I was going to spec a Pentuim D 950. Gonna be real hard to wait because I'm really chomping at the bit since we got my wife, Joie, a new fast rig! lol The Celerons won't be for my main working rig - they will just be fast, inexpensive "drones" in my render farm. Dumb bit crunchers with nothing but Windows and UF. My current P4, 2.53GHz rig will be the "brains" of the operation. I'll link them all up with a hub and Cat5 cables in the closet of one of our spare bedrooms. I've heard of a switching box that will allow the same monitor to be used on multiple pc's and will look into that. It would be even better if I could figure out how to "auto-launch" UF upon boot - then I wouldn't have to do anything to the drones but fire them up. I've been doing some stuff at work upgrading an existing design to handle USB2.0 - mostly better cabling - and had a neat thought that it would be cool if you could get pc's to talk to each other over that bus since it can go 480MHz but I don't think it's doable from a bus management standpoint. Would be FAST, though!

Mindy/Damien - yeah, I agree about the cliche' factor with the Flood filter. I usually use it for "scenes" though I did finally dip a spiral's tootsies into one, recently. One thought I had, though, was that the artists we see here are of wildly varying skill or maybe a better word - experience - levels. Most of us have to go thru the "Flood" phase and it's sort of a "rite of passage" thing that we see and have to explore for ourselves. I think the reason you see it a lot is because new artists are coming along all the time and each gets to a point where they want to try it after seeing it. We learn it and then it later because just another tool in our belt and gets used more creeatively.  "Lake" is cool to use with the waterline WAY off screen and angled - cool effect used with fbm Glass/Turbulence or with kaleido centered off-screen.

c-ya - back to work 4 this dog!

Rick