I was attracted by the subject line... I had my own small personal triumph the other day, in Atlanta at DragonCon. I managed to show a fellow artist who had been struggling with modeling in AnimationMaster how easy it was to make simple and complex shapes in Carrara's various modelers. He might just go for the CS3 boxes still available at low cost. Then I attended and participated in the Iron Artist, and won! Hooray for Dogwaffle. I had a small advantage perhaps - the topic given by the Photoshop rep was something luckily I had lots of experience in, space art that is. We had to use an image of a rocket and could use other images. I proceeded to make a planet, added an armada of spaceships, lots of special fx and animated the whole thing. Yep, that made the wow effect. so there ;-)