Damn, that means there's no hope for me :-) I would say that a thing not to forget is also the ability to visualise your ideas, I often find that the idea I have or start with is frustratingly difficult to get out (either via digital or traditional medium). This is where technique, practice and learning come in, an app with better facilities can be very useful in this part. (For example I quite like the hairy mouse I created in a tut for one of the Max plug-ins however I could do much more complex stuff with a full version of shag for Max or with the full blown XSI hair that does things like succesfully creating hair based on a spline set and correctly UVW mapping the hair strands.) I have come across a few people who do better as a partnership, one with the ideas and another who is good at visualising that idea.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.