Crop, that's it! And - as I just discovered - "crop selected" is even better! Just go to the top view, select the (in your example) water plane, and use "crop selected". No camera needed, no manual aligning (as with crop) needed either. The only disadvantage is that it is a bit harder to exaclty define the size of your render. It seems you can control the dimensions of the render by altering the width in the render settings. But this width is defining the safe frame area, not the actual width of the selected object render. Anyway... really nice that together we can improve our way of work, just by sharing methods and thoughts. Way to go, Ted! Cheers, Simon PS just checked out some of your older tuts (talking about Max 4 and 5), but still picked up some new stuff. (changing the object in the mat. lib? rotating the object? Never heard is was possible, thanks!) Still have a lot to learn. Where to find the time to read all these tuts? %-)