Nice subtle motion, a beautiful painterly quality. Very cool to see this animated. There is just a sharp black line at the water horizon that would be ideal to get rid of. Otherwise great.
Yes, 7 hours render time is almost certainly unnecessary here. I would guess water transparency may be enabled, probably unnecessary or could be compensated for, also would be curious to know the primary Detail setting, AA, and GI settings. But hey, when you have your own render farm to play with at no cost, who cares, right?
I just don't want anyone else to get scared off with those times and prices. Basically if you can render a 1920x1080 frame on your *own* machine in an hour or two, then you can afford a short animation render, and if you can get your render times down a bit more (or lower resolution to 720p, which still looks great, look at Kevin Kipper's recent animation reel), then you can render a good deal longer at an affordable price.
For animating clouds, Ulco described it right, it should work in any normal circumstance. The Transform Input Shader needs to have the cloud layer's original Density Shader node as Input and then its output should feed into the cloud layer's Density Shader input.
For animating plants, you can use e.g. a Power Fractal input to the Mesh Displacer input of your object(s). It will take some fiddling to get the displacement to be subtle enough and to animate it well, but it can be done. You'd use a similar technique as with the clouds, Transform Input shader on the Power Fractal, or possibly 4D noise instead or in addition. If you look closely in the Ponte Salario animation you'll see some on the grasses...
- Oshyan
