Ah, well. I hadn't meant to waste a day on Metaball Lab. What I was doing, was trying to find a cheap-and-dirty way to knock up an alien landscape. I figured several squat metaball fountains with a nice organo-metal texture on them would look pretty cool. Still might work....but with all those extra floating balls will be a little more Kirby-esque. Except I also made another interesting little discovery. There's no access to the "seed" for a particle generator. Every run is identical. Fortunately the answer is relatively simple; run your duplicate fountains for as long again as the first run (so as to get into a "fresh" section of stream.) Ooops. Another little note. While I was playing with more than one particle generator in a single scene Carrara locked up twice. So that did dissuade me from two many more experiments. To be honest, tho....this set was done on Carrara 4, which is still installed on my Powerbook.