Thanks for that. I have managed to retrieve all of my models from other sources apart from the Chastise Lancaster. Is there a way to retrieve this from yourselves?

ColorRamp 

Was thinking more of using a colour ramp node inside the compositor to create the alpha mask. I found an article in the wiki which may help.

Not proficient by any means with Cycles but have you tried using a colour mask in the node setup to block out the world colour? I think I remember a tutorial by either Andrew Price at Blenderguru or Sebastian Konig at Blendercookie demonstrating the method.

The best way I have to deal with the camera. rotate and pan the view until you get close to where you want it. Now hit control, alt, numpad 0. This will bring the camera to you. It puts you in the camera view. Now to fine tune it. Hit shif F. This will let you steer the camera. Scrolling in this mode will let you zoom in and out.  Moving the mouse  will cause the camera to swing up/down and side to side.  Hold the midle mouse button down in this mode will let you pan the cammera. When you get the cammaera where you want it just left click the mouse to exit this mode.  Oh yea and hitting the numpad 0 key will toggle you in and out of camera mode.

Hope this helps ya

Also, once the camera is roughly in the postion you want it to be, if you check the 'Lock Camera to view' option in the properties panel (N) and select NUMPAD 0 to view the scene through the camera, you can use the normal 3D view navigational keys to place the camera more precisely.

Opening your file with the 'Load User Interface' unchecked, should load your scene with the default layout.

verbumdomini

I Believe the 'Bad Translation or Spam remark was directed at the post from Luckyboy123 and not at your question.

A couple of tutorials at BlenderCookie explain nicely how to set this kind of thing up

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/04/21/modeling-an-easy-chain/.

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2009/12/12/modeling-a-set-of-christmas-lights-in-blender-2-5/

The Blend for the chain is also available as part of one of the free model downloads they have. Once you get the hang of it though, its a piece of cake.

Hope that helps.  

Try deleting the problem shortcut and creating a new one by selecting the poser.exe in windows explorer (right click > send to desktop) 

Or you can use the same area (the cross hatch marks top right) to merge one into the other. 

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?206790-Length-of-a-Bezier-curve-in-2-5&highlight=bezier+curve+length

On the final page someone has made an addon to do what you ask. I would suggest reading through to see whether it fits your needs. If you just want to jump in I'll attach the addon: Remove the .txt extension before use.

I feel your pain. Even after all these years of using Blender, the material system still confuses the hell out of me.  

For material nodes press the checkerboards icons.

In cycles you will get tha basic setup, diffuse and output. With the internal renderer, the screen is blank and you will need to add them manually.

It does seem that this would be an ideal candidate for Unity. If you want to check out some tutorials on the basics, there's a few good starters here: -  http://cgcookie.com/unity/page/12/

CTRL + L will select the mesh underneath the cursor.

If you want to select all the meshes that make up one of the objects that has been joined in one go, then it would be better to create a vertex group of the complete object before joining.

If you add any further meshes/verts to that object don't forget to add them to the group.

Smoothing shouldn't be affected by joining and vertices will not be merged. The only thing to watch out for is un-applied modifiers that can cause unexpected results that may not be immediately obvious. (Mirror for example).

Verts will not be merged unless implicitly told to do so by selecting and remove doubles.

EClark: 

To generate a UV Test Grid, Create a new image and at the bottom there is a box labeled 'generated type' which will give you the option of blank (default) UV Grid or Colour Grid.