So while I was learning all the technical stuff I could stand, I started to put my pages together.  Once the mechanics began falling into place, it was time to start creating images...which is the part I have the least talent with, but I like the most.  Since I don't have Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop, I had to make use with what I had.  Believe it or not, I used PowerPoint to do most of my image creation - all except the News Caster and the Provost Marshal.  It wasn't pretty, but it worked!

As for the Newscaster and the Provost Marshal, I really wanted them to look like minifigs.  I knew LDraw would allow me to create minifigs, so I went to ldraw.org and downloaded it.  I also wanted a Windows-based graphical editor for it, so I also downloaded MLCad from the site as well.  MLCad is great and even allows you to export your image as a gif or jpg. However, the images weren't at the right angle or clarity, so I went back to LDraw.org and downloaded L3P.  L3p is a utility that creates POV-Ray files from LDraw files. POV-Ray, which I got from povray.org, renders images using a technique called ray tracing.  There was still one issue with this and that's that the images produced were still at the wrong angle.  The good news is that POV-Ray allows you to position 'cameras' in your scene, to get the angle you want. So I had to spend some time learning POV-Ray's language so that I could make modifications directly to the POV-Ray file. This took quite a bit of trial-and-error.

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