I made this explosion using particles. It could probably use some work:

Click here to view the animation of the explosion: explode0001_0100.avi

It turns out that the only reason it was rendering so slow was that the person's hair had way too many particles. I turned the amount of particles down and that cut the render time in half!

Yes! I have finally started rendering the first scene. Unfortunately it took an hour to render just the first one-hundred frames which is about four seconds of animation. I may go back and see what I can do to make it not take so long.

That's all for now. I'll post more as I make more progress.

I'm finally posting an update on my animation. I have two scenes almost fininshed (just a little animating left in the second) and I'm working on the third. I have made a little test animation of the squirrel. It's not very good but it is just a test.

I'm finally to the animating stage. I'm slowly getting used to the new features and I think that once I do, animating will go very fast…or at least faster than it has in the past.

Here’s a screenshot of me animating: