May 25 2007
This is rendered in mental ray. The renders were a bit longer then fRender, but I did add ambient occlusion and reflection blurring instead of fRender’s ultra blurring. I kind of liked the fRender output better. The curvature shader help to bring out more definition in some of the tighter details. I do like the mental ray displacement more then fRender’s MTD. The crater mesh displacement setting was far easier to find, almost a default setting, and it rendered fast with final gathering.
This is still far from done, I still need to re-render the atmospheric shadows and work on the sky and sun. I think I may try and add some far mountains in the background.

Render times per frame at 1280x540:
LPod Ship layer, about mental ray 1 minute fRender 38seconds
Crater mesh, mental ray with displacement and GI about 2.5 minutes