Blender is quite a capable program with a big community, and therefore good support. It's open source and at the moment, it's free. folks. Actually, it can help you create animations of water—it's the only free 3D modeler I know of that features fluid dynamics, and even the expensive software doesn't always have this feature.

Angelize, you make me blush. The last time someone was inspired by my work, it was an inspiration to see whether their monitor could fly out a 3rd floor window.

BTW, the PNG specification allows a transparent layer, just to be a technological nit-picker. Transparent layers and alpha channels are two different sets of equations. For example, many programs are coded to ignore an alpha channel in a TIFF file. In Xara, however, the alpha is interpreted as a key for transparency. But a TIFF's alhpa can be used to map bumps, transparency, anything a programmer likes. In contrast, a PNG can only presumed to have transparency on only one layer, or not have the feature.

I was "corrected" by an engineer a long time ago and made it a point to not go through that embarrassment again.

My Best,

Gary