Thanks for the comments, folks.... And, Hoborg, NEVER worry about raining on my parade. That's why I post these things here; to get feedback! The shader IS procedural. It uses Eric Winemiller's squares for the panel look (which is where the mpeg squared-out look is coming from -- I see it now that you mention it) and it also uses Eric's noise operator with a narrow z scale using local coordinates to give that streaked, dirty look to the surface. I'm going to be breaking up the surfaces more with some real geometry as time permits. Bits like the pipes and greeble stuff near the bay give a sense of reality to a model, I think.... I thought about a different font, and you're probably right. I was going for something that would be readable from an approaching ship so they would make sure they wound up in bay 4 instead of bay 3 or whatever.... As for what happens -- someone steals a ship from bay 4 and in the process blows the spacedoor out.... This frame took about 15 seconds to render. I did a 10 second test render at 720 x 480 x 30FPS approaching the "city" with the bay door opening. It took my new machine a little over an hour to render. I was just blown away by how fast that thing is.....