Fantasy Inn

[Sigurd]

Will take you up on that offer but gimme a few weeks - I am overloaded right now. Blender is a great free app but didn't it start out as a commercial one and got bought out by FSF or am I thinking of another app. But yeah, demo images from it can be astonishing.

My recollection is that Blender was sort of an 'also ran' as a commercial rendering engine. There is such fierce competition for these things in application. Quite wisely, the owners of the copyright put the project and source up for sale to the users and free software community. I don't know how the money worked out but it was ransomed into open source status.

Since it became open source I believe it has seen a lot of development.

[torstan]

Yep, blender is now a huge open source community and they've made a monster. The learning curve is steep and they update the program regularly so there's a certain amount of effort required to keep up with the new features. However it is enormously powerful and produces amazing 3D renders and animations - and even has a physics engine built in for producing open source computer games.