Thanks guys, I'll see what I can come with and will post any results.

Thanks for the time whkguamusa and trav. I am goin to spend some time over the weekend getting to grips with meshing and exporting. whkguamusa, I mostly do aircraft at the moment and I find taht although they give big files, the Rhino simple settings work best, although I do mesh seperate bits at different settings, depending on their shape. With wings in particular I find the advanced settings not to good. To keep the leading edge smooth you need to reduce the max edge length so much that you get a hyper dense mesh in the relativly flat bits and the file size gets huge. It the single thing that Rhino people seem to hate the most, meshing and exporting. trav, thanks for the offer, but I think I'll spare you the trauma :) I can open a Rhino nurb file in Carrara 4 pro. I am going to see how the file size works out if I do this and export the mesh out of Carrara before I map it. I'll let you all know how I get on.

Thanks for the help Trav. I have got the de-triangulate thing to work. It doesn't really make the file any smaller though. I tried playing with the surface fidelity setting on re-export but it didn't seem to do anything at all, even turned down to 5%. Basically I would like to reduce the poly count of an existing model in obj format, but I don't really know how to achieve it.

Thanks guys, I'll have a go and let you know how I get on. I havn't yet figured how to even edit a mesh in Carrara, is this done in the model room? Sorry to be a pain, very new to Carrara :)

Thanks for this Dan. I know how tough tuts can be and this is great, really excellent stuff. I cant wait to try it out. I have my pylon drawn up and the GeeBee is just about done. Cheers, Brian.

Nice pics Joe, and congratulations!

To Chohole, no pun intended, but it a small world! We used to take our summer holidays in Rush, about five miles from Lusk, I know that part of the world. I live in north county Dulin (Sutton) which is about ten or twelve miles from Lusk. Donegal is a beautiful part of the country.

Dublin, Ireland, anyone else from the emerald isle?

Actually I got my times mixed up, it was seven mins with it on and eight with it off. See you all soon.

Success! Thanks for the tips guys! I have ran a half dozen tests with various settings and the one that seems best is with Interpolation off and lighting quality set to Best, with lighting accuracy at 2 pixels. This gives a lovely result on my test piece. I seems that it renders much more quickly with Interpolation off, way faster. Anybody know what interpolation does and when it might be necessary to use it? Thanks for the help, Brian. By the way, I am a Rhino man for ever but I'm going to be using C4pro a lot as it now imports Rhino nurbs directly. Happy days ahead.

I want one of those for christmas! Brilliant toys, what a blast!

Two contra rotating fans would do the trick. Two fans turning in opposite directions on the same shaft would negate the torque effect (if you want total reality, I wouldn't bother personally!).

Thats really coming along nicely, great engin!