Well, i download both of these apps, and am a little confused over the way they work 1. I got use to Rendermonkey pretty quick, and so decided to export to .fx, but it wont render correctly as the mul functions seem to be the wrong way round, i was under the impresion that rendermonkey worked with HLSL in the background, why would they be the wrong way round? which i believe is how OPenGl works, (column vectors) 2. So then i tried fxcomposer, and created a HLSL effect, but i noticed that you dont get the structure like you do in rendermonkey, that shows all your passes, techniques, varibles, render states etc. Unless you create a CG Collada effect. so i decided to experiment and create an effect with all 3 types , .fx, CG, and collada cg. And you only seem to get the structure with the collada type. I personally find this structure quite usefull, is there anyway to get it when creating a .fx effect in FXComposer? The other thing i noticed was that when applying the material to the mesh, and then choosing a technique, the only techniques i could access from the directx renderer was the .fx, i was under the assumption that .cgfx and collada effects work with both dx and opengl. as you can see im quite confused. from what i understand, HLSL creates .fx files which only load with DX apps .cgfx is a language very similar to HLSL, but has its only file type, to which you need the CG .h/.cpp to load. And works with both DX/and opengl apps Collada fx cg - not really sure what this is