Animating In Blender (Part 1)

I found myself with a bit of time last weekend and as I wasn't that happy with the decals that I used in both LDCAD and Studio on my last model, so I thought I would go back to looking at Blender for rendering (as opposed to Studio).  I'm fairly sure I could stick image decals on models in Blender so rather than flog that particular dead horse, I thought I would have a look at some animation in Blender instead and see if I could render something in Blender - I created this little mov - the model was built in LDCAD (but you could use Studio) and imported into Blender using the Blender LDRAW plugin.

 I guess I spent about a day trying to figure out the basic tools and controls for parenting and basic animation - I haven't used a rig here - just basic parentiing.

The only animation here is really the way the wheels turn when you move the model (and the minifig head goes round too!) - and I used this YouTube video to help me to animate the wheels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD1MoN3wPiM

But all in all it was a lot easier than I expected