Cool to see this. There is some nice work here, especially the sensation of movement near the middle with the high speed and extreme motion blur.
Unfortunately I think you were far too ambitious with this project, which is clear from the render time vs. resolution. 4000 frames is frankly unnecessary (IMHO, of course) for a simple planet fly-over. You had plenty of time to linger above the planet and make a slow descent, and then fly around for a while, and still make it perhaps half the length, or at most 2/3's. As I was watching it, by a little over half way through I was ready to see something different. I will say though that this was probably exacerbated by the low video quality, which muddies a lot of the potentially interesting details. In many cases I couldn't tell if there was just really bad TG2 detail popping, or significant video compression (it seemed like the latter). I think you could have had the same render time, half the running length, 50% more resolution, and it would have been a good deal more immersive (especially with higher video quality).
Regardless, on a procedural planet with still relatively little variation (compared to our real world!), even with great detail it can get a bit boring, so the video compression issue is not the whole story.
Overall a good effort, and I'd really like to see a less compressed version, if that's possible. If file size is an issue I can arrange a file space for you (try
Terragen.org first, but we've had a few file upload problems lately).
- Oshyan
