Dawn on a Forgotten Moon

[fleetwood]

From a series of fake stone studies really (that's why it's number 83), based the terrain of punkinman render. Uses an alpine type ter file that I saved. It had Terragen erosion and then this added some of Danil's erosion on top of that.

[luvsmuzik]

Great use of resources! Love the POV on terrific terrain. Nice shadows! Envious of displacement technique on fake stones. Quite well done I would say.

[bobbystahr]

Good one man,,,I like the un-softened shadows  as there are no soft shadows in space...makes it more real to my eye...

[Dune]

Terrain and lighting is really nice. I have a comment on the 'snowflakes' ( ) though. Are they stars? I would lessen them, make them sharper, and more into clumps.

[mhaze]

Ditto Dune. I also like the colour and POV/composition very much.  Excellent work.

[fleetwood]

Thanks,
Yeah, the stars do resemble snowflakes. Hey, new falling snow method ! 

The stars are coming from a photo image on a background sphere, a really hi-res photo of the Milky Way so any clumping or lack of it is "natural" but the original image is very sharp. Maybe I will switch to using a pinpoint procedural starfield, but maybe attempt to mask it by real photo to get the stars sharper but still in real Milky Way configuration.

[Dune]

You could take this render, add a layer in photoshop where you paint in the milky way in white, make the photolayer black, then export as greyscale, and project by render camera as mask for the pf's.

[Kadri]

Thanks,
Yeah, the stars do resemble snowflakes. Hey, new falling snow method ! 

The stars are coming from a photo image on a background sphere, a really hi-res photo of the Milky Way so any clumping or lack of it is "natural" but the original image is very sharp. Maybe I will switch to using a pinpoint procedural starfield, but maybe attempt to mask it by real photo to get the stars sharper but still in real Milky Way configuration.

I don't know which method you used, but with a 60 degree FOV you would need at least an 10 000 - 12 000 pixel wide image
and even more depending on the image or something like 0.16 size (for spherical image) for a good HD image. I try always to use bigger ones.

Other then that i like the image, looks nice

[fleetwood]

Well, tried out a few ideas. Eventually just using procedural stars without any fancy mask seemed to have the best look to me.

[Dune]

You nailed it. Great.

[DocCharly65]

Convincing extraterrestrial planet surface! Great!