It seems like Blender has been really advancing a lot lately.  They've done a lot to improve the GUI as well as adding a lot of useful tools.   Its a shame work on the PT2 tools seems to have stopped, that would have nicely rounded out those options.

Now if only GIMP would catch up to Photoshop just as quickly...  and also not crash on Windows 7 (I think its secretly trying to tell me to switch to Linux, and I am soooooo tempted).

There are at least 3 different plugins for Firefox that I've found that let you download videos, I use 2 of them.  Sometimes one works there the other doesn't but they don't seem to conflict with each other.  I haven't had any issues with Firefox crashing but that may be differences in platform and OS.   Chrome seems pretty highly rated so whatever works for ya.  If you need need a vid, let me know and I'll see what I can share (have to be careful, some were not free).

Glad you like the garden project so far, don't know if you saw my blog post about it on my web site, I've got quite a bit planned.  All of it was modelled in Blender.  What I've shown so far are just the low poly models which are what I'll be distributing.  I'm also doing some high poly models (and by high I mean about 100k polys for one wall) that I'll be painting textures for in Blender and then baking the texture and the displacement map to the low poly wall for export to Poser.   With the detail I managed in the low poly wall, should produce pretty good results.  I'm hoping to do about 4 complete texture sets for it and also thinking of adding a "distressed" overlay if I can manage it.  I'm still figuring out how to set some of it up in Poser.

In a way I'm glad to still be working in Poser 6 for this because it means my final project will be backwards compatible and should work fine for a pretty wide range of Poser users, that's always a good thing.   Am looking forward to getting the new software (Pro 2014) though and seeing what it can do.

I think I vaguely remember trying Hexagon once.  I learned 3D modelling originally in a VERY old copy of of 3DS Max years ago as well as some Autocad training I had back when I thought I was going to be an architect.  I had started really getting into 3D modelling about the time my career as a painting contractor took off and I just didn't have time to keep up.   So now I'm back to 3D modelling and digital art.  Bit of catching up to do, but fortunately I learn fast.   Now if I could just manage to squeeze about 40 hrs into a 24 hr day I'd be set... lol   So much I want to do and never enough time.