thx hsb... did that about 2 hours ago... it seems as if i'm having a problem with fog...
i had to set the NoFog option on my model to get it to be seen... and it appears that the same holds true for the level block...
i set the level fog to 0 0 0 but it doesn't seem to help
i also made a map entity out of it, so that i could assign the material directly to it... that worked, but the scale of the texture was about 100th of the original size...