Hi, thanks for clicking in... you might find this one worth a full size view. In an alternate universe where the dream that was the Apollo program didn't die at the hands of the bureaucrats and accountants, the United States Spacecraft Discovery One has lain abandoned in the vicinity of Jupiter these last eight years. The last transmission of mission commander David Bowman remains a mystery.... perhaps the planning of a followup mission is under way at this very moment. Geeky Science Stuff (skip it if you're only interested in the art): I really wanted this scene to be, if not accurate, at the very least plausible. I constructed a scale model of Jupiter and the four Galilean moons in DAZ|Studio @ 1 cm = 1km. There are 5 spheres, which were created at the appropriate size. Each is parented to a null for control and the moons were all translated out the requisite distance along the X axis. To orbit the moons one simply rotates the nulls along the Y axis. The only major concessions I made were: 1) I moved the Discovery from the L1 point in Io's orbit (between Io and Jupiter) to the L2 point (beyond Io) so that I could have both Io and Jupiter in shot at the same time. (if you understood that give yourself five geek points. If you saw it before I pointed it out, give yourself fifty) 2) Discovery is about 100x too big - I found DAZ Studio gets a little cranky trying display objects that are only 15mm long. Those two items notwithstanding it's a pretty accurate depiction, from a astrophysics point of view. We have Jupiter and Io in the middle ground with the other three Galilean satellites in the distance. I don't know if this particular conjunction of moons has, or ever shall occur; but it could. Production Credits: High quality textures for Jupiter, Io and most of the rest of the solar system and beyond are available at the Celestia Motherlode, an online repository for the 3D Astronomy program Celestia. These textures and normal maps are credited to John van Vliet and they are awesome. This actually got started testing DAZ Studio's new normal mapping functionality and took off from there. Discovery Spaceship was a freebie from from Vanishing Point. Lighting: 1 Distant light with ray traced shadows. 100% Strength, 100% white.. what more do you need? Materials: Jupiter is a pwSurface2 material with a 4k texture and diffuse rim color added for the atmospheric effect. Io is textured and normal mapped also at 4k with strong specular highlighting. Discovery uses the default surface settings with all ambient removed. Rendering: The scene was rendered DAZ Studio 3 at 3000 x 1125 pixels. Separate passes were done for the diffuse, specular and atmospheric effects. Each pass took about an hour to render. I also rendered masks for Discovery, Jupiter and each of the moons. Postwork: The starfield was painted in photoshop using a combination of my own techniques and a tutorial I was pointed to at: http://nameless-designer.deviantart.com/art/Star-Field-tut-24155245 The render elements were added in screen mode with a mask to block off the background. Part of the Jupiter atmospheric effect was added in post by filling an area the size of Jupiter with bright blue and applying a gaussian blur to get just a bit of edge. I added a little rim of sulphur and a faint volcanic eruption to Io using the same technique. I used some grunge brushes to add a little extra texture Jupiter's clouds and painted back the harsh shadow line on Io just a bit. I expanded the canvas and added the titles to complete the image. You can thank Arcas for putting Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra into my head... this one's for you Rob! As always your constructive critique and comments are most appreciated! Thanks again, --m