Something that’s new for me is that I’ve been having a look at Blender recently. After 8 years of being a 3DS Max user I’m quite impressed by how much blender has grown since I last looked at it, and how much more useful than 3DS Max/Maya it could be in computer graphics education. My opinion is due to the fact that it applies graphics principals in a similar manner to the way we teach graphics rather than as fancily named features with a few buttons that make stuff happen. I also like the fact that the built in game engine, compositor and nle video editor provide support for the types of CG education that are about to become more common in universities. I haven’t had a chance to play with the Verses support for networked collaborative scene creation or the Dr Queue render farm possibilities but they look cool. I’m not sure I’d want to use blender in a production environment (yet) because I’d be slower with it, and another drawback is that finding current tutorials and documentation is tricky. I’ve only been playing with the app for a few months on odd evenings when I need a break from writing up my work but I’m impressed enough to be actively seeking someone who would pay me to spend a few months working full time with it to produce some training resources.