Unfortunately, I don't know of any other way of painting across seperate objects except joining all the objects/UV's into one.

I usually overcome this by creating vertex groups for each of the objects before combining to make selection easier both for the UV Map and when it comes to seperating everything again.

Your solution though seems to be a better one as the seperate file would allow everything not to be painted to be deleted which may make things a lot easier. Will have to give it a go.

http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/sim

The above site has details of possible programs that use this extention.

1. A SAP Tutor File

2. Steam Game Backup Information

3)Aurora Image

If the top row is the Blender Internal then the viewport behaviour is as expected as the textured view is to see how UV Mapped images appear on the object in order that adjustments can be made. Plain colour and image mapped will show while procedural textures will only show in a proper render (F12)

The lamp in the BI is casting shadows as evidenced by the black square on the forward face of the cube. Try moving the lamp to a different position to check.  I have tried to set out a scene such as yours and applied the lamp colour only as you say in cycles and everything has a green hue as expected. Without checking your blend file it would be difficult to diagnose the problem properly. The only thing I can think of at the moment is to make sure the material is set to emission and that the size is set large enough to envelope the objects.

Try changing the lamp from point to sun as this will give a uniform light as a test.

I use Movie Maker from Serif which I think is around 40UKP nowadays but you can always give the video editor in Blender a try. Works fine if you don't need a load of special effects so for a simple presentation, it should work fine.

That looks like a cool script. While I use BI for the textures of models I make for Poser, they do look much better in Cycles but the manual conversion can be a bit tedious at times. If this works, it should save a lot of time, even if you have to tweak them.

Must try to keep an eye on the addons thread at Blenderartists for these kind of gems.

There is a way to make a selection of vertices on the the same plane or edge loop into a circle. In edit mode, select the vertices you want to include and select Mesh > Transform > To Sphere ( CTRL+ALT+S) and move the mouse away from the center towards the edge of the screen to form them into a sphere or ellipse.

There must be a minimum of 5 verts selected for this to work. As with everything it is view dependant, Front, Side or Top. Any other view will skew the circle.  

I don't work with curves very often but it appears this may well be a rotation issue. The cursor position appears to be in the right place just that the 'tunnel' has rotated.

 I would make sure that all the rotations/translations/scale on the tunnel and nurbs path show zero on everything. Check that the nurbspath actually deforms the tunnel the way you expect. Save a copy of the file and then apply the modifier. You should get a better idea of whats happening then.

A screenshot of the properties panel would help as well.  Check also that all objects are in the same space (world or local) as this can produce similar results

For tutorials you can go to blendercookie.com or blenderguru.com. Andrew Price has some decent smoke/particle tutorials (but does tend to waffle on a bit)

After adding a mesh object look in the properties panel for an icon that looks like a tick with a ball on top. This will open up to display all the different simulation types.

For smoke remember that it requires a domain for which a cube appears to work best.

HTH

A manual cleanup is really the only way if you want to keep the detail.

Alternatively, you can make the sole a seperate object and use the shrinkwrap modifier to fit to shape. Add a cube and make sure it is a little larger than the sole and has enough subdivisions to get the detail then add the modifer to the cube. The cube mesh will shrink to fit.

Hope that helps.

Be aware though that in the UK JD Wetherspoons policy is not to allow e-cigs in their eatablishments as their staff cannot tell the difference between them and the real thing. I kid you not . . . . 

There is also  Russian ZIS 42 Half-Track available at the site ranman38 mentions. . . 

For a simple twist just use the 'Simple Deform' modifier, then use an array and curve to fit as stated by Hedheld.

My pleasure.

Install and troubleshooting instructions seem pretty straight forward: http://cgchan.com/suicidator/manual/installation 

Only proviso is making sure you have Java installed. Where exactly are you going wrong?