Thank you guys for your feedback. I am now back to the drawing board - starting with a simplier shape first... Are you refering to doing this in Maya at all? I was asking myself the same question... It would be the equivalent of trying to animate a flyaround of "ascending and descending" or "waterfall" (actually that would make a cool, if difficult project) indeed, that would be cool! You might get away with blendshapes/animated textures to fake the shading. (Set it to the illumination channel in the shader so it doesn't light with the renderer, similar to a skybox) I'll try to follow these directions - after I went through the lightning and shader tutorials Thanks again