Fantastic Halo. Never even thought of looking at objects panel.

Thanks Criss. Tried that too and it isn't working. Anything else you can think of, I'm stumped.

Hit N key for the Transform Properties box with all your co-ordinates. Shift - S for all your snap options is really handy for positioning too.

Yep, Wings and Blender work really well together. It's worth learning both. As for the manual, I'm a bit old fashioned maybe, and much prefer to be able to flick through a book, but I think it's the same as the online one.

Jump straight into Blender, it's a fabulous package, it's free and it'll do everything you want by the sounds of it. Watch the video tutorials at blender.com and go through the other tutorials. The manual for sale is really good. Any 3D package worth learning will take some time but Blender is quick to get used to, so go for it.

Get them at http://www.geocities.com/pollythesheep/matlib_index.html I think it's updated from v1.01 There's heaps of good (free) image textures at http://www.mayang.com/textures/ http://www.free-webspace.biz/sonix/Cars/Blender234CarMaterialLibraryR1.html is great too. I think they're also linked from blender3d.org under resources.

I think the tut. is xvid codec. Download VLC player and it'll play the tutorial. Sorry, can't remember the download site but I'm sure you'll find it.

Try getting some pics of lightning from the web, bigger the better. Pull the levels in so you've got good contrast then select the white with the wand (and select similar as retrocity said). You might need to deselect any stray bits of selection with lasso of marquee. Go into quick mask and scale up your selection then save it as an alpha channel. Now you can drag the channel across to your pic, make selection from it, fill that and follow retrocitys suggestions for blurring, color etc. It works pretty well even if the original is low res. The attached pic is part of a poster done this way. Jake