">Simply use the 'put on ground' button: select object and you see it at right"

ycarry, thank you for the tip-off, it was indeed simple. I spent quite some time poring over the interface to find something like that (TurboCAD has the equivalent so I thought Kerkythea should) but I never noticed the ground, stack and center buttons floating there at the right.

However, my argument - which I don't want to develop here, because this is a forum for MoI - is that it needs to be even easier. My argument is not that these packages are incapable of stunning images in experienced and diligent hands: the galleries show that is possible. My argument is that only one of the half-dozen renderers I have tried is intuitive for a beginner to use, a problem that restricts demand to those who have the time to dedicate to mastering a renderer. Keyshot picked up my model, retained the materials, put the objects on the ground plane, lit them with sensible default options and put the whole thing right in front of me looking impressive. Nothing else did that. Why not? I'm staggered! When I was a student I was money-poor and time-rich and I thought nothing of spending weeks learning a new piece of software. Twenty years later I'm money-rich and time-poor. I literally cannot afford the time to spend weeks battling with software that doesn't want to help me. So at this point it's looking like Keyshot: Luxion wins the competition for my $995 and everybody else loses.

Returning to MoI, I handed over my $195 to Michael Gibson and will be paying more for the upgrade to v2.0 the instant it is released because I was making useful images with it 10 minutes after I started using it. Visio engendered the same "Aha!" moment in me when I tried v4 in 1995 or 1996 and that's why I labelled the thread "the Visio of 3D". Like Visio, MoI has a lot of depth but the UI focuses on reducing the time investment required to do something useful with the software. For $295 it seems like a bargain.

Regards
Dan