Originally posted by arran: THX1138 - I am pretty sure I had it plugged in to the correct place. As I said, everytime I rendered, the materials that I had attached the occlusion node to came out black until I started playing with the max distance which was set at 0 as the default. I am using 7, but I have 6.5 on my other computer so I may give it a shot on there. Thanks for all of your help - I'll keep playing with it and experimenting. Wow, that is intresting. I get really good results with my maya 6.5, with my max distance set at .0 .Mabe it's something with Maya 7. Anyway, keep experimenting and you will get it all worked out! I'm glad I was able to help you out. I cant say that I have a favorite model at this time. There are a few that I really like, but it's really hard to decide. The work from all the competitors gets better every challenge. I guess I'm more for originality in this challenge. Thats why I chose my mech for this challenge. It's something that has never been created before. It's one thing to copy, but it's different to actually design something from scratch, then make it. You never know, Mike may go for originality when he judges the entries.