Good news that you found a solution! BTW, as good as C2 is for texturing and such, C3 is even better. It has a gradient color and fractal noise shaders now, among others. Within the vertext modeler you can assign what's called "shader domains" and then use the layers list to give each domain its own distinct shader. The layers list is much more useable with C3 than with C2. And the vertext modeler has a lot of improvements. Modeling is so much better now in C3. The best thing I can say is that upgrading to C3 was the best upgrade I did in the past year and a half. Looking forward to your development of this project, in any case.