If you get any distance through the render before it crashes or let the preview run for a bit you will notice that the old sorting order problem starts to show up, brown line near the top edge of the clouds.
I had another look at the original scene and decided that I was taking the wrong approach; trying to do it properly is not going to work while the sorting order problem persists. This is a shame because making the moon by placing a dim "Sun" behind a non shadow casting sphere, which can be correctly lit by an out of scene sun worked well here:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=2259.0Looking again at the scene I am attempting to duplicate I decided that the "Moonlight" is actually coming from a point light somewhere in the middle distance with either a textured sphere between it and the camera or more likely a bit of post work.
I have started again with this cheat method and am just now making the final tweaks to the cloud layer prior to doing a high quality version. I am still using a power fractal to add features to the moon but I can always patch in a crop once I dig out the image map.
I have been at this for a couple of hours and not a single crash.
The aim was only to do the scene as pure TG with no post work and the cheat version will do for that, I will come back and see what I can do with the proper one another time. I have another project that is just needing a couple of custom objects to finish it off and I wanted to sketch out a new idea. That's not counting all the normal things I should be doing.
