Virtually everything is animateable, but there are no presets. You can do convincing water animation, but it will require a fair amount of manual tuning and tweaking to get right. The principles are simple however, just animate the position and shape of fractal noise functions that provide displacement for the water. Here are a couple links you might find interesting:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=7896.0Clouds can also be animated and making convincing "time lapse" animations is fairly easy with simple noise translation. You can also animate size, position, density, color, etc. Honestly I think clouds are probably one of the easiest things to animate, aside from camera motion.
Render times vary, of course. It will depend on the elements in your scene, detail settings, render resolution, and available CPU power. As a rough guide, a very complex scene at 480P on my Core i7 can render in 20-30 minutes per frame with a high level of detail and motion blur. If you have a static camera or low motion blur, you can get away with less AA and lower render times. If you have smaller populations than mine (millions of instances), again render time will go down. I could see getting frame times as low as perhaps 10 minutes with water only and a slow moving camera, on an i7 920. Going to HD 720P resolution would quadruple that.
Camera paths can be imported in Nuke's CHAN format. Other import formats are pending.
If you have any other specific questions let us know.
- Oshyan
