Your 3d work seems very exciting and I can well understand how the "Nexis Platform at Midnight" with glass, reflections and lights could take several hours if not half a night. I think the solution you're proposing is the way to go, doing shelves of books as maps rather than individual objects. You might be able to achieve some "depth" using a bump map in a separate channel. Also, if you haven't found out by now, whatever you can construct within Bryce, primitives, booleans, and/or metaballs, this is far more advantageous than importing meshes, modeled elsewhere. I did a 1930's teletype machine in Electric Image and brought it into Bryce. The keyboard alone was around 58K polys, but when duplicated four times, it totally crippled the program. I then did a Photoshop grayscale and Bryce terrain. Having almost three times as many polys, Bryce not only rendered quicker even when multi-copied, but the redraw also remained fast. good luck, manowar