I would do it as separate clips, and use a video editing program to do the transition. Long takes from the same viewpoint are generally not nearly as good movie-making as short takes with changing viewpoints and fields of view....
I answered you PM, but might was well also answer here.
I run 64-bit Shade under Windows7 Pro. Some of the features differ. I am only aware of AVI and Flash as output for animation. At this point, I render to AVI and use Vegas Movie Studio for editing and conversion to MP4. I saw no place where I could select either of the other two ...
I knocked out a tutorial at
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The simplest way I can think of is to make the smaller sphere follow a path. That will give you the chance of using an elliptical orbit as well as a circle.
Create the large sphere.
Using the disk primitive, draw the path.
Convert the disk into a line object. (Right click, select Convert→Convert to Line....
As you add resources, ShadeExplorer becomes increasingly useful. I have a huge number of image maps that I have created, bought or downloaded from free sources. By clicking on Create Catalog, one can make all the resources immediately available. It even handles sub-folders. If the Surface window is selected, a double-click will send the image into ...
As an alternative to bump maps, Shade added displacement maps in version 12. They can produce some dramatic results and can be baked into mesh. Levels of fineness can be specified—the more coarse, the faster the render. Of course they can be combined with any other map, diffuse map for colouring, reflection map to restrict what parts reflect and so...