Thank you carodan. I have it straight now.

Seeing that we can have an object by object, control over smoothing, it becomes less of a problem. I have been rendering without smoothing for a while to avoid this artifact. I just rendered a scene in TerraDome that is very complex, with smoothing enabled. It did not create the artifact in the TerraDome textures, but it did cause some distortion in some of the trees. The figures however benefitted from the smoothing. I can turn it off on those objects that look better without it, and get the benefits of smoothing for those objects that need it.

Thanks again.

lmk

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.