it's vertex animated, acually it's all one model, and the way that it is done, it will not show any signs of any 2d sprites or flat anything, because if you look at it from above, you will still see the model, believe me when i say it was hard to come up with, we had to look at alot of japanese games, including gundam games, to notice that they did it the same way. pretty soon we may post a video of the effects in action, since mp_dev decided to explain it to our good friends at gs forum we think it would be nice to show it to you, it's not that hard to do it, enjoy this small contribution