An oldy but goody from my archives...let me explain what i did here... Made a cylinder and applied a water texture to it. This is my water-plane. Its large too. Whipped up a scene real quick emulating a shoreline relay center of the alien sorts. Imported my models and made effects for them... Engine trails and the like. One ship is close to the water so i made a "rooster tail" spray from the engine blast hitting water. Bryce sun and clouds and haze are disabled. Sun is non-visible and custom atmosphere set to all black. Shadows must be left on though for any light to have them.They are are 100% black. First thing i made was a new atmosphere and sun... My new sun is 7 radial lights, no fall of, intensity 2, in a spread out circular pattern in side 2 spheres with sun-like materials on them for the surface and glow. Made the sun spheres super massive and moved it far, far away. Next, i made 4 spheres, each one bigger than the last. and centered them on my new "world" center. Inner sphere:Volumetric cloud texture, allows interaction with the clouds, set to basic shading so it plays with light.(see lightning). Second sphere:Surface cloud texture, allows interaction with sunlight(sunset and rise colors). Third sphere:Surface atmosphereic Material, Allows glow effects in the sky and around the sun, also effects sky color. This sphere i have used is black with red and yellow specular settings and is transparent. Fourth sphere: Volumetric atmosphere Material,Largest of them all. Controls main sky color, in this case, blueish. Suface material alone acting as atmosphere made some strange and undesirable artifacts, this outer volume layer corrects such things. Lightning: This is a terrain and a duplicate thats a little bigger and glows it with a volume material. Had to enlarge them to reach from volume cloud sphere down to where the ground is and its very large. 4 radial, gradient lights,no falloff and spaced along the length of lightning illuminating it. Blue Planet:Twice as large as my Atmospheric Bubble. And very far away has two detailed moons. One moon is still forming and its surface swirls with gases and molten rock. Purple Planet: The gas giant,5 times as large as the blue planet and even further away. One moon(so far) Ships:I modelled these in Wings3D. Gave them textures and effects in Bryce. I can rise up out of this atmosphere and it would turn to a space scene in a realistic way (good for animations maybe). All planets and moons and the sun grouped to "orbit spheres" to control their orbits. Extra gradient radial lights provide some extra illumination here and there. Scale was the key here...things had to be massive. Atmosphere Bubble fits perfectly with cylinder water plane. No postwork other than frame and sig. Think that covers everything..Sorry for being long-winded. Hope you likes and thanks for looking.:)