Hey Kix, thanks for your dedication in helping me get this right. It's a great learning curve.

Quote - Ok, here's the next set of ideas that I have.

1.)  You are (at least I'm 99% sure) rendering this in direct line with the light you have in the scene.  I would suggest moving the light to the right or left.  Then you will be able to see the dark part of the planet.  The way it appears at the moment, the light is just above the camera and the camera isn't at an angle that can see the dark side.

Done, although this does not seem to have made much difference.

Quote - 2.)  I'm going to make a guess here and assume that you have put the starfield into the background and not the backdrop?  If that is the case, switch it and see what happens.  My suspician is that you will then just have too many stars.  Try it and let's see.

I think I might have resolved this by setting "tile" on for the starfield.

Quote - 3.)  You need to reduce the amount of glow in the sphere that has the planetary halo a little bit.  I'm not sure but I also suspect that you may need to adjust the gradients somewhat and I'm also 99% sure that you haven't turned on the "point at" behavior to have the atmospheric glow sphere pointing at the light source.

Done, but once again no dramatic difference.

Quote - 4.)  I think you need to make the cloud sphere just a tweense bigger (like 1% bigger).  I make that assumption based on the fact that I don't really see any cloud shadows.  However, that could be an artifact of the way the camera and the light is positioned so let's wait on that a little bit before we jump off the deep end.

I had already set the cloud sphere at 101% and the halo sphere at 102%. > Quote - Oh sorry, I'm messed up here with the light thing.  I see you are using a distant light (good choice).  It won't matter where you move that light, what will matter is how it's pointed.  So here's my suggestion for that.

Add a behavior to the distant light to point at the planet.  Then when you move it, it will change the direction that it's pointed and then it will do what I have implied in the previous post which is to change the direction the light is coming from.

If you don't know, distant lights work as thought they're at infinity and shine in the direction they are pointed.  Their position in the scene is irrelevant given that they operate as thought they are from infinity.  So that might be part of the issue about how your lighting is or isn't working.  It also means that if you want the soft shadows to truly work, you need to set the size of the light source big.

Sorry about leaving out that tidbit.  Let me know if that helps.

Thanks, but I'm not sure that this bit has really helped.

Quote - Hey and one last weird thing, I've never used any of the star maps that come with Carrara.  Where are those?  There are a handful of options to deal with stars so keep posting your results and let us know what happens.

At worst, I built an environment I called space lab.  I can't remember what the starfield in it looks like (in other words, I don't know if it's any good anymore, I built the stupid thing in Raydream about 12 years ago).  If it comes to it, we can figure out a way to get it posted in the backroom or something so everybody can have a shot at it.

Maybe a tuturial for a space environment is a good idea.  I will have to think about that one a little bit.

The starfield.jpg file is under Scenes/In Space in the Carrara folder. There only appears to be one.

Once again, really appreciate your help.