Mike, you're a godsend - thanks very much! Works like a charm, and it also moves quick (guess cause it doesn't have to recalculate those curves!).

One other quick question - you can see on the top of the shell, the pattern is really blurry... the texture I made in PS was 1000x1000 when I projected it onto the top surface of the shell... the projection window however was only tiny when I imported it, I had to scale it by about 5 times in either direction, and that's why it looks pixelated. Is this something I did wrong, or should i just make the textures bigger? I modelled the shell using a reference picture that was 200x200 pixels, so I would've thought 1000x1000 would be plenty?