As another example of few edges not necesarily producing a smooth mesh: In this example one edge on a cube was bevelled, and then the top resulting edge was moved down and forward, resulting in this sharp edge.
Love the sculpts. The water atmosphere needs work though, does not feel like they are in water, too uniformly sharp, needs dust bits, lighting falloff, atmospheric perspective, etc.
Nice animation but you already know that :) . Let's talk about that hyabusa or that zr1 corvette you have. From me trolling your site they look pretty sharp man.
The sliders are setting the maximum potential value of each attribute. this is then modulated by the spec/gloss map. I set the spec to 1 and the sharpness to 256 and rely on my maps to control the values.
Here is an update. I made this building and texture came up quite sharp. It will probably get blurred once I re-open the package. Anyways here it is(ignore the road).
some people use techsmith codec on avi, some people use xvid for avis, also for ultimate sharpness (if it matters) you could use x264/h264 encoded on avis.