thanks mirek - yeah, still working on this, doing the odd bit every now and again. I need to get the taxis done and have been trying to decide whether to keep working on them in polygons or start again using nurbs, which always make my head hurt. At the moment, as it's just the model, it takes two seconds to render.

thanks for the offer with the translating - i'll keep it in mind. Not sure what your sentence meant though...