Hi Alligator, I think nothing much has really changed in the world of rendering packages as far as any programs being discontinued or totally brand new ones coming along, so I think those older topics will still have all pertinent information in them.

But I think that SimLab Composer is probably a good bet to try first anyway. Probably the renderer that is currently the absolute easiest to use is KeyShot, but it's significantly more expensive than SimLab Composer. SimLab is a good blend of pretty easy to use yet not so expensive.

There are also a whole bunch of rendering programs that are kind of oriented around making movie effect animations, those can be pretty complex though.

- Michael