so i'm happy as a clam with the link AS gave me, I'm ready to render the planet for my backdrop instead of layering it behind in photoshop, everything's fine, it takes 30 seconds to load (8000x4000 or something like that for a planetary texture of the earth)... but it's working. of course, i'm not happy with it, toil at it for the past 4 hours or so, and then i just decide to photoshop it around because the planet just looks fugly. But then halfway through the textures start giving me trouble. Either they get stretched beyond belief, or they stop behaving correctly in terms of light and so on... what i think happened was that all textures I had were stretched to the size of the gigantic (independently, it's not like i hit select all or anything). so yeah. bah to closeup planet rendering in Bryce. You have to be REALLY good to pull it off, not to mention have a computer that screams pixels rather than the POS 1.7gig p4 i have. multiple-processors anyone? Drac