Real 3D newbie help?

I’ve just installed Real 3D v3.53, an old but powerful animation package, from a magazine cover CD (Digit Magazine #35, May 2001, http://www.digitmag.co.uk ), and am having some trouble getting started. The help does seem pretty good, but there are no newbie tutorials with step-by-step instructions. Once I get past that level, I’ll be OK with it.

The company, Realsoft ( http://www.realsoft.fi ), has moved on to version 4, and has nothing I could find about the version I have. They may not even be the original producers.

I didn’t find much on the Web, so what I’m looking for is a For-Dummies sort of book to get me going.

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Since I posted on the weekend and got no replies, I’ll give it one last try, in case somebody who can help missed it the first time it was at the top.

In other words, bump!

You’re right, I did a quick Copernic search and only a couple of engines turned up any results at all (HotBot and Webcrawler seemed the best – the latter probably because it’s an engine that has a lot of older pages).
Some sites are in Russian or Finnish but here’s a few in English with links to others. 3D is a tough curve, I believe. Good luck !

http://www.demon.co.uk/activa/ - links look promising
http://homex.c2i.net/kpetter/RealGall.html
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jyhokkan/real3d.htm - Finnish with English translation.
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jyhokkan/kelly/projects.htm

Thanks, L_C! I had the Activa link, but the others are new to me. I’ll take a look.

The 3D part isn’t really too bad, once you get started, espacially (That typo’s too good to fix!) since I’ve messed around with POVray and related utilities a bit already. The ideas are pretty straightforward, although I certainly have lots to learn.

The problem I’m having is the interface - each menu item has a dozen or so submenus, and some of the items there bring up dialogs full of cryptically-labelled sliders and check-boxes.

Oh, well. I’ll figure it out.

Thanks again.