"Doesn't look very good" is a bit vague...a screen shot might help. Anyway, to answer your question: Yes, a shader might help but you need an ES 2.0 capable device for this (and it doesn't work in the emulator). With current devices, this isn't an issue though. Currently, there's no real shader library or something like that. You'll find a parallax mapping shader in the HelloShader-example and some other stuff in the forum. What might also help are the default shaders that can be found in the jar. They are used to mimic the fixed function pipeline's behaviour when using the ES 2.0 render pipeline. Maybe you can tweak one of those to suit your needs. If not, any OpenGL ES shader tutorial (the ones for iPhones will do too) should help too.