"Blue Giant" was created to showcase the 8K Methane/Ammonia Gas Giant textures I had created using Digital Heaven's "Cosmic Pack 3D" which I have recently acquired. I've really enjoyed the tutorials over there and the texture creation pack he was offering seemed like just the thing for me. Recommended: http://www.digitalheavens.co.uk/ I created the texture using his 'Gas Giant' Photoshop actions set. I pretty much followed the tutorial that comes with the set to make this texture. Of course I didn't stop there. I also created some cloud maps of the wispy white clouds on the texture by dropping the saturation and enhancing the contrast to pull out the white clouds on a black background. I made three of them, each one grabbing less and less of the cloud by leveraging more contrast and less brightness. I also created a bump map using the tools in the Cosmic Pack. I then took that bump map and ran it through NVidia's Normal Map creation plugin to make a normal map for the texture. Finally, I created a displacement map by converting the bump map to 16 bit color and running a high pass filter on it, then tweaking the contrast and brightness, then saving as a 16 bit .tif file. These texture maps were then combined on a sphere in DAZ Studio. I used the Ubershader 2 with sub surface scattering, some velvet effect and the bump, normal and displacement maps to give the sphere a feeling of depth and light scattering within the cloud layers. Next I created 5 geometry shells for the sphere. Each one was slightly bigger than the one below to create 5 layers above the main sphere. The first three got the cloud maps created from the texture, each one a bit less opaque than the one below it. Shell #4 got the 'alien' cloud map that comes with the cosmic pack. Shell #5 got a pwEffect shader applied. It is a bright blue color that uses the edge blend modifier to become more opaque at the edges and transparent in the center. This really made the atmosphere pop. I set the scene up to get really close to the gas giant, so you can see the detail on the texture. The moon used existing diffuse, bump and normal maps that had previously been created in 'Fractal Terrains' (you can just about see it on the distant moon in 'New Sunrise'). I reworked this texture using some of the 'ice planet' textures included in 'Cosmic Pack' and combined the bump map from 'Fractal Terrains' with the bump map of the re-worked texture. This was all applied to a sphere primitive and I used the Ubersurface2 shader to lend a bit of SSS to give the ice effect. It's probably too subtle to notice Finally the Probe Ship was modeled in Modo and imported into DAZ Studio for rendering. It only took a couple of hours to throw this together using some basic modeling techniques. I tried for a distinctive silhouette as I knew that we were not going to be seeing a lot of fine detail. The two ships are identical. In DAZ Studio, I rendered the ships, the planet and the moon in separate passes. For each pass I rendered the sun diffuse, the sun specular, ambient and fill lighting passes. I also rendered a black and white mask. The ships also got additional renders for reflection and ambient lighting. This was all composited in Photoshop and the starfield painted from scratch. I did a lot of tweaking and painting, but essentially each element pass uses the mask in multiply mode, with the diffuse, specular, ambient and fill passes placed over it in screen mode. Each of these layer sets was grouped for easy management and the levels, hue & saturation and vibrance adjustment layers were grouped above. Finally the framing and title layers that I typically use were grouped above that. This is essentially how I build all of my composites in Photoshop now. It gives me the ability to tweak every element individually. I can adjust the lighting intensity and position of any element. In this case, I repositioned the moon and each of the ships in post to clean up the composition from what was originally rendered.