Many thanks for the response...

I will double check what light's I'm loading... thanks... that's a good point! Pretty sure I had at least one infinite light in the scene. But I may have had spots too... maybe they should all be infinite? Or I need more spots at strategic points.

Eventually I was thinking of having lights self illuminating parts of the model somehow.

Yeah I'm not sure of why the hither setting is having an impact either. That doesn't seem to affect how much of the length of the model appears in the Preview window... but rather how much detail shows.

Especially odd though because the detail (the nurnies) that seem to be affected by the hither setting are all the way along the receding length, rather than just on the nearfield nose of the model.

Its odd. Maybe an OpenGL issue? As I say that happens in Preview... but gets resolved in Preview if I dial up the hither to between about 10 and 50.

However that is possibly separate to the issue of the model not rendering past about a quarter of the receding length.

I'm keen to avoid scaling down... as that would mean also scaling any foreground characters in the scene down too I think.