Sweet! I just got my license.
They honored it. I was way late, so still holding my breath. I haven't had a chance to mess with animation at this level before, but have done some stuff with Pinnacle Studio. Mostly transitions and titles using keyframes and spatial references.

Back in the day, I used to hand draw animations on the margins of book pages. A good size novel would yield a program that could play for several minutes.
The decision now is which computer to lock it to.
My XP PC(P4w/ nVidea card) Slower CPU, but superior hardware acceleration for graphics.
Or, Vista laptop, w faster CPU, but standard graphics.
I'm leaning toward the XP PC. She's been a real trooper, and probably the best machine I've built.

RobertB

The decision now is which computer to lock it to.

You can lock it to a USB stick, external drive, etc.... or NIC card, internal harddrive, DVD drive, etc.... basically anything that can generate a device ID for their license generator. No need to lock it to a internal drive. My only predicament at the mo is deciding whether or not to use a flash stick, or alternatively drop the license on an external "project drive". The drive is bulkier, but ultimately more reliable I think. I own a total of two USB flash drives, one of which still works, the other of which lasted about 3 months before it crapped out... so as far as I'm concerned, USB flash drives have about a 50% failure rate... As they say, your mileage may vary...

I linked it to my C drive on the XP system, just because it has been so stable.
Open a blank .txt file, and paste the license text into that. It has to be in the root  directory of the drive, not a folder.
After doing that, it fired right up.
I spent a few hours with it. No problems other than learning curve stuff.
There are some excellent video tutorials available that have been a big help.
Renders take a bit of time, but I expected that. Motion is silky smooth on my P4 w/nVidea 6600.

The complete messiah folder w executable & content is relatively small, only 83 Mb.

Check out Wings3D while you're at it... it's a free modeller, and it's been around for quite awhile: http://www.wings3d.com/

Some links to tutorials and docs here: http://www.wings3d.com/wiki.php?title=Community

I'm sure you can find a lot of other useful info via google "wings 3d tutorial", etc.

Mesh

keith


Check out Wings3D while you're at it... it's a free modeller, and it's been around for quite awhile: http://www.wings3d.com/

Some links to tutorials and docs here: http://www.wings3d.com/wiki.php?title=Community

I'm sure you can find a lot of other useful info via google "wings 3d tutorial", etc.

Thanks Keith....
For someone who hasn't used either Blender nor Wings3D, how would you differentiate which is the better program? Does a bigger user group play into this as well?

 
To be honest, I haven't really used blender all that much, primarily due to the ATI issue I mentioned above, and the hardware available to me at the time. It seems those ATI issues have been resolved in the latest versions, so I might take another look at it... Wings3D is a subdivision modeller, where you would take basic volumes and subdivide them down, chop them up, combine them, tweak them, etc. into an overall shape that you refine. There's a good example of this type of process on the blender site, actually: http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/01/14/human_base_mes/
 
Lots of those same operations and toolsets can be done in both apps, and what he did in that video could be done in wings just as easily. Blender goes further with boolean operations, nurbs surfaces, and probably other tool areas. Overall, blender proably has more modelling tools and methods than wings (at least wings sans plugins), but it is also a much larger app to wrap your head around. Wings is strictly a modeller, so I think that alone allows the UI to present itself upfront in a much simpler fashion. They're both free, so downloading them both and running through some basic modelling tutorials won't cost you anything.
 

Animation is part of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional model of the rapid sequence of works of art or image display, in order to create an illusion of movement. Movement because of its effect is the phenomenon of persistence of vision the illusion, you can create and demonstrate a variety of ways. Animation, the most common method is introduced as a film or video program, although there are other ways.

You'll need to change to perspective view or change the position of the camera if I understand correctly what your saying.
Look into those terms in the help.
Perspective view is achieved by pressing the P with the circle around it in the top left portion of the viewport the T-rex is in.
As a matter of fact that is how you change to different views including getting back to the camera view if you've left it for another view such as top or left or perspective, etc.
 

According to friends with many years of experience in professional TV/Film editing and production Maya is excellent, I would love to get the 'entertainment creation' suite, and of course 3ds Max suite would be awesome but from $4,995.  Other contenders for low budget 3D Animations might be something like Vue, some of the landscapes, skies and such was used in the movie; Avatar, it also has nice particle and water effects that look quite natural, impressive.

Hi Robert,
That's great you're able to spend time and move forward with this.......I'm still learning X1 and haven't spent any time on Messiah. I'd like to see the video once you're done with T-Rex. :) 
Glad to see you're keeping the thread alive!!