Here's a quick question: is there a way to keep the attraction effect between two metaballs, but stop the blending of the materials, particularly if one metaball is smaller than the other? Specifically, I am modeling a cartoon bird's head out of metaballs, and have applied a bumpy material to the head, but have have found that the smooth, single-colour material on the metaball beak (which blends into the head and is much smaller) is being washed out by the head material. Any suggestions?

I could be wrong but can't you transfer colors with Boolean? Or perhaps you could make a metaball slightly smaller than the "head" ball (keeping the head a regular sphere) and color it the flat color so that the "beak" metaball would attatch itself to that and keep the same color. I can't tell you for sure because I'm on a non-Bryce loaded computer right now :)

Thanx Andini! Your solution worked perfectly. :)

That's so helpful Andini, I'd been wondering about how to solve this problem myself, now I know. Thanks Cat