I wish that I could thank each of you individually for the advice, but there were so many of you responding.

So, Thanks, All!

I will be looking at (absorbing?) a lot of video tutorials. I don't know why I didn't think of that, the tutorials available for D3D are very helpful. Lots of information to retain, though.

I've been hands-on while I read the manual, trying to learn-by-doing. Slow! But, I'll get there.

Oh, markschum? What I mean by scenery is pretty much anything that isn't breathing. I was mostly thinking about structures, interior and exterior, and their surroundings.

Brief flashback:

I was at Digital Corp. in Massachusetts in the early 1970s when a programmer showed me his latest feat: He had written a program that  caused a little 8x8 pixel box to bounce around the screen, changing color whenever it crossed it's own trail. Soon, the screen was a mosaic of different colors.

Forty years ago, THAT was cutting edge stuff! (We saw the first screening of Star Wars- Yes, Han shot first.)

We've come a long way from Fortran and Assembler.