Frames Animation (right click and download .avi file)
Sketchup had a great interface with lots of nice looking objects and shapes. Unfortunately, since the program is made for architecture, I realized after a lot of experimenting that you can not animate individual 3D objects. What you can do is save sections of your 3D model and then animate it sequentially. In the end, what I want to do with the picture frames is not very well animated in this video clip.
The best thing to view the .avi files with is mplayer which is available for most linux platforms
Square to Sphere Animation (right click and download .avi file)
One Stressball Animation (right click and download .avi file)
After starting out with Sketchup, Blender seemed much more difficult to learn with. However, overall, Blender is much much much more powerful. For one thing, anything that you would like it to do that it can't do can be modified. All of the geometric tools that are included with the program are much more easily manipulated.
One thing that eased the installation of Blender was putting it on a linux platform. It made things much more easier. I had (and am still having) some trouble understanding what some of the functions do. Sometimes, it seems like one particular button does different things at different times. A couple of the functions that I did figure out were the transform functions on the meshes. Those are very useful to what I'd like to model
I found that the absolute best way to learn blender is to follow this tutorial very closely. I tried to skip steps and such at first but following every step closely is incredibly important. After I got through that tutorial, I looked at the Square to Sphere example here (right click and download .blender file). Those two sources pretty much gave me all the essentials I needed to know to get started.