Recently I read somewhere, that sections of planetary rings (in this case Saturn's rings) rotate at different speeds. Saturn takes about almost 11 hours for a complete rotation. The inner rings are roughly twice as fast, whereas the outer sections take up to 17 hours for a complete rotation. That sounded quite interesting to me as an inspiration for an animation in TG. There are far more things to consider, but I worked especially on the different speeds. This is obviously not Saturn, but some imaginary planet.
For the surface I found a nice planetary texture, which I upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel. I made a displacement map from that by making it a greyscale image and additionally handpainted the crater sections black to get a more precise map.
Of course my animation is way to fast, so take it as some sort of time lapse. In this case I rendered everything separately to compose it together later, which gave me more control. I rendered 200 frame animations, which I stretched to 400 frames afterwards.
The original clip is a 18MB file, so no chance to upload it here, and compressing made it look like crap. So I put it on Vimeo. Still a lot worse than the original, but OK.
https://vimeo.com/786534387
