Anim8or Community

Let me know what part of my response doesn't make sense and I will attempt to clarify.

Cool, Anim8or can handle Ambient Occlusion via scene attributes and to be honest I totally forgot about that! It would have improved the output though using soft shadows and fiddling with light range/angle settings does go some way towards a similar effect.  I wasn't able to get anything like the original image with a single light source (which I presume the original image used, apart from some ambient lighting) but that may have a lot to do with the materials and how they interact with the light.  So my image is really a 'cheat' that uses a bunch of lights including one to fake the sphere's caustics.

Love it, love it love it!  For a frustrated engineer and musician like myself this is deeply pleasing on a number of levels.  Absolutely brilliant!

WRT rollers, long ago I found a Torus .a8s plugin by Tyson Collins. I modified it to be able to generate a 4-sided cylinder (3-60 sides) with up to 2000 rings. You can specify inner and outer diameters, too. I've attached an example of it in use, along with a zip of the plugin.

Very cool!

Screenshots of the extrude method:

Smoothing with a tension of 1 just places edges and points between existing edges and points without actually smoothing anything, whereas a tension of 0 would give 64 smooth facets.  Your point about the end caps is valid but this can be addressed with 'edge reinforcing' prior to smoothing.  There are a few ways to do this but the goal is to double- or triple-up any edges you want to keep sharp before smoothing.  The roller below was lathed from a rectangle with 32 facets (first image - note the tripled edges around the inner and outer rim) before being subdivided (second image).

Yes, you can certainly lathe a 100-sided N-Gon into a sphere shape, though you will end up with a doubling of the mesh since the object would actually be a torus with a diameter of zero.  A simpler way is to start with the basic sphere primitive and subdivide it, either by converting to a subdivision object (Build > Convert to Subdivided) or converting it to a mesh (Build > Convert to Mesh) and using the Build > Smooth Object command with a tension of 0.  In the latter case you can smooth as many times as you like, doubling the number of lat/long lines each time, and the result is an exportable mesh.

Subdivision objects use an algorithm to determine subdivisions between the basic mesh so an exported version of the object may only include the original low-res mesh, but this can be resolved using Build > Convert to Mesh.  Subdivision objects are excellent for 'organic' models that will be morph-animated, since you only need to animate the coarse mesh while allowing the subdivision algorithm to smooth everything out.

One thing to note: due to its topology the sphere primitive may look a bit pinched at the 'poles' when subdivided.  Subdividing the dodecahedron or icosahedron primitive results in something more like a geodesic object without polar distortions and approaches a spherical shape with a couple of subdivision stages.

EDIT: I momentarily forgot that the sphere object can be converted from lon/lat topology to geodesic by double-clicking to open the object dialog, and the geodesic divisions can be defined (max 6).  While not strictly a true geodesic it may subdivide more smoothly than the lon/lat topology.

Aside from polygons being the culprit for your slow render times, as RudySchneider has suggested, I can't see anything in your render that's the obvious cause.  Slow render times are usually the result of things like numerous complex ART materials, lots of lights, soft shadows, AO etc. and none of these are evident in your render.  One other potential cause is massive texture maps but even then I wouldn't expect anything like 35 minutes to render the frame713 image.

I would recommend a process of elimination, replacing complex textured materials with simple materials, removing extra shadow-casting lights etc., until the cause of the slow render is found.  Without seeing the project as a whole or knowing your system's capabilities it's hard to say how quickly that frame 'should' have rendered but from what I can see (accepting that there's likely to be a lot I can't see from the render) that frame would have rendered in less than a minute on my system.