Thanks bobby, one day your suggestion can be very helpful.
In this case FrankB did such a good job with his Planet Pack that even the stars can be manipulated. They are an image map shader projected on a the background and repeated. I only understand to make them smaller, bigger, more or less dense... but that's it... I understand perhaps 5% of the planet pack so I don't change anything, I don't need
The moon is almost physically correct. For easy use I used a textured spere object. It's app. 1/3 of the planets size. I chose the distance just for a plausible and realisic look and position.
Animation is already in work. This time it's a monster. Rotating the planet didn't look good and as I have seen, the clouds and surface layers seem to change.
But you all should know me - I mostly find a crazy solution through my improper use of Terragen
In this case I used the fact that not the planet is rotating under the satellites but satellites in reality are orbiting the Earth with the necessary escape speed for a stable orbit... believe it or not: The objects and the camera are moving with some 1000 km/h. (Not sure if it's really km or just "Terragen-units". Of course I did not calculate the exact speed - I just did some tests to find a plausible looking speed. A big challenge was finding out the relative speeds between the objects so that the ISS will overtake the docking station... and some moving vessels...
It has been a busy weekend (besides checking the new rendering of the Viper in te desert...)
Here a sideview of the docking station (TheBadger, you're right - will perhaps not be a Star Trek vs Star Wars movie but some universes may meet for playing cards - or at least the galactica viper should get lost here because of a navigation mistake
)
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And to enjoy the the depth of the universe in 3D:
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