I've been pulling out my hair ALL DAY long on this problem I'm having, with no solution in sight! Let me explain first. I have been using 3dsmax 8 for doing character animating for over a year now. Until today, I absolutely loved what I could do with it, and what it could do for me, but now I have become so completely frustrated, it may have caused me to ABANDON 3dsmax FOREVER!! In Max, there is supposed to be a way to morph materials based on morph targets you create for a model. It's called a "morpher material", and what it does is this: If I apply morph targets to a model, each target is assigned a number. Based on this, I can apply this special "morpher material" to the object, and put different sub-materials into various numbered channels. The numbers of the material channels correspond to the numbers of the morph target channels, and allow me to dial up a morph target on an object, and it's material will automatically blend into whatever material I had assigned to that channel. If no morph is actively dialed up, then the morpher material uses whatever "base" material you want it to. GREAT! In theory, that's an awesome idea, and VERY useful for animation!! However, in practice, it DOES NOT WORK on certain types of character assemblies, particularly the kind I have already rigged and prepared for my animation project!!! What this means is that if I wanted to use this special material, I'd have to COMPLETELY START OVER AGAIN, and hope and pray that I took the proper steps this time to allow it to work! Needless to say, that fried my egg, and I'm considering moving to another 3D package entirely now because of it! Before dropping any more MUCHO bucks on a "high end" package, and tackling a new learning curve all over again, I decided to take a peek at Carrara 5 Pro. What I need to know right off the bat is this: CAN Carrara do what I need done here?? If not, I'll just move on to Maya, which I have heard also does this type of thing well. I need to be able to automatically blend from one bump map to another as I dial up morph targets. I need it to be a PROGRESSIVE blend, meaning; I need it to look seamless in animation at high resolutions, and gradually blend into play as a morph is dialed up. I really don't want to hear things like I would "have to use an animated material", or "keyframe the maps to animate manually". Remember that I'm moving from a high end package here. All I want to have to do is link certain maps to certain morphs, and have them progressively blend to the base material whenever a morph is dialed up. Do-able?