ThunderStone:
O.K. let me help you catch up (alot like in LOST where they catch you up on the whole season every episode - except here the plot is a lot thinner and the actors aren't as 'pretty').

Since The Bryster was at one point was searching out the Heretics, I offered a peace offering of Guinness, English Muffins and a little Earl Gray to which he graciously declined (I think his actual words were Yuch!! ) . . . but in the offering he revealed that fish and chips would be O.K.

With the help of Sally Struthers (famous humanitarian and one time actress- she played Archie Bunker's daughter on "All in the Family") Mr. Snoink and I built a vehicle carrier that remarkably was capable of Warp drive. Putting the semi-sloop "John B" on the carrier, Mr Snoink bravely carried out his assigned five year mission to deliver Fish and Chips to Mr. The Bryster on his chosen home planet, Mars. On the way however, Just as Snoink revved her into warp drive, Mr. Snoink had an accident with a Skynet satellite which is now headed for Earth due to Mr. Snoink's ineptitude - (you might have seen something about this on the news.)    

After losing contact with Snoink for a few days, we now find him orbiting the Sun in about the the orbit of Mars  . . .

ICM:
I don't usually save Br files in sequence leading to a render but in this case I did. I started out by showing a multi-rep of a terrain to show that you have to offset .01 less than the size of the terrain or you get a gap(gap included). Then I made a multirep object out of booleaned tori which i decided to give a glass texture and it ended up on the same render. Hmm I said and moved my camera so it was just outside the tori while looking down on the terrain rendering that. I didn't like the colors I got some muddy browns same as if you mix too many colors in oil or water paints. So I took the render from that and made a terrain which I lowered until most of it looked dark gray and smoothed it.. I then multireped a new group of terrains using the texture preset that looks like Bryce Canyon. I set the modified terrain above that, made it mostly transparent and with it between the camera and the new set of multireps rendered again. That's the texture for the "red planet". Then I  did another render, using a clear globe infront of the planet so it would catch the Bryce sun's rays ...and Snoink is just Snoink; you've seen him before.