Actually, I know how to do all that. I know how to make mirrors and chrome and stuff like that by simply adjusting those things in the attributes window. I'm talking about linking swatches in hypershade together to create a complex shader. Like starting out with a blinn, then linking a bump map to it, then linking a sampler info swatch to the blinn and so on and so forth. That's what I can't do. I downloaded several shaders from Denfo's site and some from Alias|Wavefront's site, then graphed them onto the work area in hypershade to see what the basic layout of some look like. They can be as simple as a blinn and a bump or as complex as ten swatches all joined together somehow. Anyway, I'm not that foreign to hypershade and simple textures - I just don't understand why certain nodes are linked to other nodes and swatches.