Yes, and all done with Lightwave 6 or 7 on workstations of that time. No Intel duos back then. Probably still Sun Corp. workstations with who knows what, inside.

Yes, I see. That's actually more what I had in mind. (nice generous and instructive site)

As for closeups, I think I will always keep the one Star Trek Voyager image in mind, where the Voyager travels above the ring plane of some distant planet, and the icy particles are visible and partially seem to reflect that ship. Very cool. It doesn't get much better than that. :-)

Karl

Good job! The only problem I have is that a planet is probably 1000s of miles across, and the rings 10s to 100s of thousand of miles. See the problem? They'd fade to just a shimmering, sun illuminated/planet-reflection lighted haze in the distance, and not anymore individual asteroids. They're not exactly a ring of breadcrumbs on a plate. It's a visually difficult problem, graduating from close and relatively identifyable rocks in the foreground to the distant dustmotes and finally individually indistinctable ring of haze.