My finished or near finished CY anim:

http://meselfs.8bit.co.uk/cy.zip

Just to give you and idea, it took:

2.5 hours modeling
15 min animating
3 hours texturing (this will be significantly cut when I have an established CNC texture library)

I rendered 45.

For Modeling, I use and recomend Rhino. You can get an eval version free at www.rhino3d.com (limited to 25 saves). It has a VERY efficient UI and has some wonderful options. It is not required absolutely but is my preference.

For texturing, animating, and rendering, I recomend Cinema 4D, demo (no save) at www.maxoncomputer.com. It is a WONDERFUL animator, and has one of the best and most efficient rendering engines ever made. With it's very rich plugins, you can:

Make some VERY nice materials without using a mapped image.

Make VERY realistic fire with little effort.

Have grand control over particles.

Use equations and extremely simple programming to add precision and automation to your animations.

Paint/texture directly in full 3D.

So after I do all that, I use a freeware program called IrfanView to automatically convert/rename them into PCX files, available at www.irfanview.com (link sometimes fails, if so, search it).

But it's not yet ready to be an SHP: the mixer will not correctly write the SHP unless all the 8-bit PCX's have the same pallete. So I use a shareware program called VideoMach to remake all the SHP's to a single pallete. I don't remember where to download, search it. It is 30-day trial but does not lock up after 30 days, it only says in ugly letters NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY.

Tell if you have anymore questions!

meselfs himself!