Primal Earth, ???

I bob and weave like a savvy prizefighter, trying to stay out of trouble, trying to find a place on this project where I can land a successful punch. But I'm blocked at every turn.

Vue is too slow. I won't have storyboards for weeks. I can't figure out how to make slices of the earth.

So I thought I'd turn to something fun that I know how to do - planet making. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a primal Earth for this piece, so I decided to build one in LightWave. First I jumped up on the web to do a little research on what the Earth looked like 3.5 billion years ago. (That's when the client wants the animation to begin.) And it turns out ... there's almost no information out there.

Remember Pangaea? That single 'super continent' that existed way back in time, before continental drift had spead the continents out to where we see them today? Turns out, that was only about 250 million years ago. That's only about 1/16th the age of the Earth, and long after life arose. Heck, there were dinosaurs tromping around back then.

That's not so very old at all. What about the other 15/16ths of the Earth's life? What did it look like then? Beats me. I can find vague descriptions of what was happening then, but what did it look like? Were there clouds? What color? Were there oceans? What color? No handy photo guides for me.

Starting from scratch, then, I created the most horrible primordial earth ever. It really sucks. I must start over again today.