Hello Guy,

I like your animation. You are being ambitious and I consider that a good thing...it forces accelerated learning.

With the two spheres, you can still see the object geometry (ie. that it is faceted). You need to select the spheres and turn smoothing on. You also, while each one is selected in OBJ mode, should likely press ctrl-2 to give it a Level 2 Subsurf modifier that will smooth those Planets right out.

Re: Pronounced seam...

There are two ways that stand out. Since you rotate the planet with the seam, we can't just hide it on the far side. You need to bring that texture into Xara and make it relatively seamless. (color down the seam with cloned parts from the image so that the seam virtually disappears) The second method is to repeat the texture, but to make it a mirror texture. (this is the lesser of the two solutions as your eyes will likely still be able to see that it is too symmetrical along the edge. The best way is the first choice to rework the original texture so that there is no hard seam.

Re: Start and Stop

This is because Blender normally wants all animated properties to smoothly EASE IN and EASE OUT. For this planetary motion, you don't want that, since planets don't do that. Go to your Blend with the animation and go to the Graph editor. There is an option there, under Channel, for Extrapolation mode. Turn that to Linear and those curves (responsible for the ease in and ease out) will become lines and the animation will cycle smoothly. For your steam engine anim, easing is what you wanted... it starts from stop...accelerates... decelerates ... then stops. For fans, propellers, planets, spinning logos...anything that just is spinning with no acceleration/deceleration, you must manually choose Linear to get the right motion.

Hope this helps!

James