Hello Guy,

Thank you very much, that's very kind of you to say!

I too was very intimidated when I started with Blender. It was version 2.49, which wasn't laid out nearly as logically as 2.5+ versions. My advice is just take it one little piece at a time and to PLAY with it, so it never gets to be an agonizing chore.

On another thread, Larry was trying to animate a kaleidoscope. I can't for the life of me figure out (yet!) how to do it in Xara, so got the idea of doing it in Blender. I really just built the thing in Blender as if I was making it in the real world. Take three mirrors at 120° angles and put the camera at one end, the moving image at the other.

I dearly love it. As I've said too much about I am sure, I just think Xara and Blender work great together. Very often, both are open and I'm going back and forth as I need assets in Blender, I make them or edit them in Xara. [Objects in Blender can have up to 10 textures applied to them, controlling everything from coloring, to specularity, to mirroring, to transparency, etc.]

If you take the plunge, feel free to message me with any questions or problems that you come across. I like to be a resource where possible!

One other thing, if you have interest, I can easily provide the packed blend file and you can just open it up in Blender and see what I did and also edit it to your heart's content while learning.

Take care

James