OK, several hours later, and you guys all are waiting to be bored stiff by my trials, so here goes: I discovered my apparent error on the black background: I had somehow toggled on the pre-multiplied alpha button. That nullified my background color. That's fixed, obviously. I have discovered formats and aspect ratios that appear to give me the desired size of image. That's nice, too. Also nice is the fact that I have gotten some oversampling settings that smooth the model pretty well -- not completely, but pretty well. Now I'm looking to see if I can apply filters to get this thing antialiased a bit better. Any help there would be appreciated. Toon shading relies on the edges, which I can go up to 255 on, and no farther. The results above are at the maximum edge setting. Not too bad, actually. I am getting a bit better with the camera, too, and the rotate command, which is similar, but not exactly like, Wings' alt>left click. Is it just me, or has the workability of this UI improved in the last couple of years? I couldn't get Blender to do squat a couple of years ago, and now, though I'm by no means looking at a decent workflow, I'm off to a MUCH better, faster start. BTW, I read that the multiple undos is new. That is awfully nice. I still haven't found the default number of undos yet; any help there would be appreciated. Learning a program from scratch is never easy. Thanks for all your help so far.