Originally posted by mtmckinley You can map the specular of a shader with a file to help dirty it up, or you could use layered textures/shaders. This is fairly simple. In your material attributes, you'll see small checkerboard buttons next to each attribute. These are the mapping buttons. By mapping a file to your specular highlight, like a cloud procedural texture, for example, it gives it a "dirty" appearance. Originally posted by mtmckinley A blue flame/thrust shouldn't be too hard to make using either particle effects or a soft-body surface with a cool flame shader. This is a little more complicated, and might be a tough to warrant explaining in a lot of detail in a post like this... The gist of it, would be creating an emitter, perhaps using a nurbs circle, depending on what kind of look you're going for. You'll probably want to use either Cloud particles if you don't have compositing handy, or some sort of hardware particles like multi-point or multi-streak. By adjusting the particle appearance, speed, emitter rate, etc you can make them look the way you want. You can apply a Newton field to make the points converge or expand, depending on what kind of thrust you're looking for. Using Softbodies is a bit more complicated, but the gist of it can be found at a cool link here: https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tut...le/candle.html Good luck.