Quote - a bit fast at the beginning.

maybe hit too many trees.

I thought I hit too many trees too. Problem is The ecosystem was dynamic. So if I moved the camera, what is seen by the camera changes and the trees would all move. If I was to do it over (because I didn't plan on using my computer for a month) I would make an area heavy in hero trees and have the dynamics on the perifery only. I would also do it with much higher quality sky and light settings. here at -1 each. I'm re-rendering the last 100 frames of mostly sky at +3 and +3 for sky and light, but that is very time consuming at about 4.5  hours per frame