Alternate (and way too long) title: The Melancholy Seas of Methane Lie Cold and Still. This started out as an imagining of the surface to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. But Titan is completely covered in clouds and you really couldn't get this kind of view. So I transported it to another solar system where the conditions are similar but the view is better :) This also allowed me to get away from the red/orange atmosphere I had for Titan and move to a more conventional blue, which suited my crappy mood better. Vue8i render. The terrain is an infinite procedural with the now familiar terrain fractal + constrained recursive filter to produce this eroded landscape. I wandered the camera around the landscape until I found just the right view over the sea. That's one of the neat things about a vast procedural landscape - you can go with a nice 'found' location which can help things to look a little less contrived. Materials for the landscape included a snow layer right at the shore, some layers of rock from Chipp Walters' "Terragen" collection, overlaid with a layer of sand on the flat areas. Finally I added another layer of snow on top and used the orientation constraint to make it appear on the shadowed sides of the hills, away from the sun. Then I changed the color of the sand to more of a bluish white, as most of the surface 'soil' on a moon such as this is actually going to be dirty water ice. The sea was done with Vue's 'Methane' preset. After trying several bump settings on the water I decided that dead still gave a strange and alien feeling to the environment. There is also a layer of 'foam' around the coast to suggest methane ice around the shore. Unlike water, methane freezes from the bottom up. The ringed planet is an actual object in the scene, not a planet billboard, consisting of a sphere and a plane. The plane has an alpha map and a texture map created in Photoshop, and the sphere is textured with a quick gas giant texture I made. You can find some excellent tutorials on creating planetary texture maps over at www.solarvoyager.com I pulled the ringed planet waaaaay out into the scene and made it really big. Then I positioned it with the ring plane pointing towards the sun and rotated to show just a bit of the plane of the rings. This is actually how you would see it from the surface of one of the moons as their orbits are almost certain to be nearly co-planar with the orbits of the ring particles. Yes, I'm an astronomy nerd. For the atmosphere, we went with the ever popular spectral atmosphere with global radiosity - takes a while, looks great. I pulled the sky densities and altitudes down and reduced the atmospheric perspective to 0.25 to denote a thin atmosphere, and added a strong layer of fog down low to give things some additional depth. After trying and discarding several different cloud options I went with a 2D Cirrus layer from Dick (Eonite) Schnerzinger's 'Cloudscapes' pack. I pulled it back to make it really thin and wispy. Finally I added a skosh of lensflare to the sun and set the shadowing to a not-too-soft 1 degree shadow. Final render was around ten hours on an overnight session. In Photoshop I did some mild levels adjustment and added framing and title. I decided that a short Latin sounding title gave a more astronomical flare ("Mare Melancholia" = "Melancholy Sea" in Latin) than the longer bit of doggerel that had been running though my head while I was finishing the piece. As always, I look forward to your comments and constructive critique - anything you could add that would serve as a basis of improvement would be most appreciated!