This was a quick test in Blender and Cycles. I am getting used to the Cycles way of doing things and GPU rendering is starting to feel like a friend. The new denoising features of 2.79 is looking good. Even though it is not optimised for animation, it is working well. I had to add in the shadow of the sphere in After Effects, as the ball did not produce enough of a shadow itself. It is features like selecting specific objects to recieve a lights effect, that I miss. I did find I had an issue trying to get the lighting to be the same at the beginning of the animation and the end. The physical nature of the lighting model might make looping a problem. More tests will be needed to find out for sure.
