thanyou for your advise again but i know that. that will work with an ma file. but the shaders i've downloaded seem to have many parts. jpegs, readme's and an mll script. i sumised it was probably thye mll script i needed to import, but when i do this it doesn't appear in the hyper shade. the help says something about importing the whole shader, (all the files) into one of the maya install folders. can neone help?