CRogers - Nice to see you about again, the image looks fantastic and can't wait to have a read through of the tut.

crogers: it looks fantastic, a very realistic effect! fun that you made it from scratch yourself instead of using a photo for the plane, and fun that you used all open source software and got in both blender, inkscape and gimp!

Thanks He4rty. Good to be back.
Thanks AnMal. Yes, I've been designing graphics and commercial products with Blender 3D, editing product photos with GIMP, and constructing websites with Inkscape lately. Partly as an experiment to see how much of the Adobe Creative Suite I can replace in my work flow. The answer is "nearly all of it". In about another month of experimenting the answer will probably be "all of it". The only things I still struggle with are package design (all our printers expect an ai file, and Inkscape will not output that type of file) and CMYK colour files for magazine adverts. So I do all the graphics in GIMP, then open in Photoshop for the CMYK conversion to tiff, and import to InDesign to export the pdf with printers marks and export to printable pdf. I have a feeling that Scribus can do the printers marks, and I think someone told me Krita can do CMYK colour export, so I may look into those as well. The part that isn't done in GIMP, Inkscape and Blender takes about 60 seconds. So I'm almost there!

Don't know how good it compares but I'm sure somebody posted this link on here once, RGB to CMYK Converter.

Thanks for that link. There are command-line utils that can do it too locally, but I'd like more local control over the results. Sometimes print companies ask for a specific IIC profile (that isn't in the list on that site). I just haven't had the time to figure it into my workflow yet (or send test files to magazine companies to see if it actually works correctly). Will post full workflow after I work out the kinks.