Aye, I know there are better images and I know Mojoworld has better mathematics to do this kind of thing, but I ran into an old file called Planetarium.br4 on my work computer, god only knows when I started it...! Thought I'd give it a go, this image was done in Bryce 4, the lense flare is KPT, but the actual planet and moon are untouched Bryce-style. Any feedback and/or how tos to make this better? Or more realistic? I've seen some awesome planetary pics in the galleries, maybe someone has some tricks I could benefit from?

Looks great so far. It might look good with a shooting star in the center between the sphere and flare in the black space area. The mats and haze on the lower right sphere is very pretty. Good luck with whatever you decide. -SeaC-

very nice. I almost can't believe it's pure bryce :) very nice surface texture on the planet. As for ideas on improving realism, here's some things you could do; I'd make the atmosphere halo much thiner and it should have very little ambience or even absolutely no ambience at all. The visibility of the atmosphere should depend on the light from the star. Bumps on the clouds and shadows on the surface from the clouds help realism too. And then you could try to faking some fresnell effect. Making sure the water has much higher specularity and reflection then the land adds much realism too.

I'm with Ray on this one, you need a thinner atmosphere.

Sure, I'll give the thinner atmosphere a whirl... perhaps it's too bright, on your screens, due to my dying monitor on this old Pentium 2 at my day job. I haven't viewed it yet on my wonderous Shamrock at home... The planet is 3 spheres, 1 solid, 1 slightly-tweaked Cloud preset, and 1 for the haze. The moon was a combo of Silver (from the volumetric library) and some Aligator skin I made a while back. Here are the mats, if anyone is interested...

And here's a quickie screenshot of the scene, it's quite simple really... In the past I've always had to use some negative lights to get cool planetary effects, this time it seems like the amount of radials took care of this effect for me? Thanks for checking it out!

Way to go SDL! Rayraz picked on the clouds and a little on the atmosphere but ... more on scale: Sun and too close to the planet. Something about the moon doen't seem quite right can't quite put my finger on it It looks too close somehow or too large or something even though it appears to be scaled properly perhaps it's just me or an optical illusion because I'm sitting so far away from my screen. I dunno... The earth is apx 8000 mile in diameter and the atmosphere goes apx 100 miles above that. if the earth is 8 inches the atmosphere should be about 0.1 inches. So if the planet is earthlike it should maybe have similar proportions. one other thing I noticed regards the sun's corona - would you see stars througgh the corona of the sun and if so would they appear distorted? Not being picky I like the scene the way it is, just a fyi. - TJ

cool BTO's :) I'd like to have those :)

Thanks for all of your input, my friends! I checked this one out on my Shamrock at home (read : kickass monitor) and the haze is waaaay brighter than I anticipated! A rework is rendering at my work right now, I'll post it when I get there and hopefully it will be a bit cooler. No Photoshop this time, just straight Bryce...