Ah, that makes thing a bit clearer for me now. I wrote a track editor some time ago which basically used splines to generate the "path" of the track, then generated and saved it as a 3ds object. i don't know how useful that would be to you if the phasers are in constant need of updating. What performance-hit are you getting using pipes? There may be some tweaking there that incorporates uv mapping.

I'm sure the source for my track-ed is on one of my drives somewhere. If i find it, or figure out anything else i'll post it.

Those screenies look great btw :thumbsup: