Well all that now seems easy compared to trying to animate each tile to fly to the spinning globe, sticking to the surface at the correct location and finally begin rotating with the globe.

This was incredibly time consuming. With the help of a couple of custom MEL scripts it is now starting to take shape. The scripts did really help, however, I did still have to select each tile and their parented groups. After 3 days of setting up, testing and animating, I finally have a animation playblast to show.
(I'm sure I wore a hole in my outliner by clicking in it so much) :lmao:

https://www.kickarz.com/tile_animation01.wmv (6.5Mb - right click & select Save Target As)

This playblast has been sped up quite a bit for display purposes. The final shot will probably only show the last 50-60 tiles hitting surface.

All comments welcome...