After many years of having either insufficient time or resources to take up 3D animation, I finally took the plunge with Blender. Things have improved dramatically since my early-90s experiments with Infini-D on a 25 MHz 68040. Not only have performance and image quality increased beyond comparison, but Blender is free software licensed under the GNU Public License and includes a plugin system based on Python which has been used to implement such features as crowd simulations. I can tell that I have yet to scratch the surface of this tool. The interface has a steep learning curve, and is extremely efficient once learned. I’m having a blast!