some planetary WIP's

I used the Lunar Cell plugin for Photoshop to make the planet texture and bump as well as the cloud layer on another sphere over the surface; very high-rez 2000x4000. Used the soft shadows on sun/moon button in the sky editor per Vile's suggestion. the texture was modified a great deal though from the plug-in's direct output. For one, lunar cell makes the water a single flat color and I wanted the hues to change with depth as they do in reality so I did lots of layering and fiddling with the water. I'm still not terribly convinced or happy with the realism and will likley dull the greens a bit on the land masses in the future. Will also try to get a wee more blue in the haze of the atmosphere as well a some more cloud cover before using it in an actual scene with a starfield and such. Beyond that I'm open to suggestions (especially from Vile) on how to improve the planetary look.

Funny thing happened though, On the first version of this file I had clicked on that same button but every time I rendered the image the shadows had a sharp cutoff. when I went back to the sun/moon editor I found the button unchecked. So, I clicked it again and again the setting wouldnt take hold. So, I saved the file, closed Bryce restarted the machine and opened the file again to the same bizzare behavior. Finally I had to start over. Luckilly the image is only 3 spheres so it wasnt difficult to reproduce. This time the setting stayed on. I thought It might have been a temporary situational bug or glitch but the problem was actually saved with the original file. Has anyone else run into this sort of thing?

Dave