That's funny--I've made a "radiosity" study yesterday night using a white ball on a piece of cloth. :D seems to be a popular concept. fill lights have nothing to do with Vue, specifically. :) "fill lights" are the second tier of the three-point lighting approach. The "fix" light (first tier) is the main lightsource which illuminates the focus of your image, produces the "natural" shadows etc.. If you don't use ambient lighting, this of course results in rather dark images with a high exposure / contrast. Say, a pot lighted by one spotlight will have a very bright spot or specular, but almost black shading at the back. To make "lost" detail visible, you add more lights, the "fill lights" or secondary light sources (second tier). Fill lights usually are a lot less intense than the fix light--average ration would be 1:4--simply because they are not supposed to really light the scene, but to provide additional shading. In the "glass" picture, I used 6 spotlights as fill lights to lighten up the room some, and "chisel" the shadows as well as the contours of the glasses. I'll provide seperate screenshots with only fix lights, fill lights, and bounce lights in the tut. You're right about the polygon count on those glasses. Each glass consists of just about 10,000 polygons. In wireframe mode, you can hardly make out the individual triangles. ;) Eats up memory like mad, but is well worth the effort, I'd say. ta, -Sascha.rb