Thanks, folks.
dombib: Not smoke but close
. The rings are the cloud layer method that I made from a few weeks ago. There are some example .tgd's in the following thread, the one from this post is most like the model I used here...
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8989.msg96996#msg96996These Saturn ring clouds use quality settings of; No acceleration cache, enable ray-traced shadows checked and a final quality setting of 33(= 2035 samples).
Kadri: I did have the shadows quite a bit sharper in tweaking, I raised the softness because I thought it helped increase the sense of a massive scale... The true scales of the scene are ridiculous, the main planet has a radius of only 12 metres, the smallest moon is 0.25 metres!
I suppose I could give it another got reverting back to harder shadows, it isn't a long render, maybe another time.
In a full scale planet, I had samples in excess of 15,000, just for a quality of '1'.
It's still really quick to render, regardless of the huge samples taken, the ring layer is so thin. The full scale 'cloud depth'(controls how far they extend outwards from the equator) is '5.5e+007', that drives samples through the roof! Lucky it's so thin, eh?
I ultimately went back to working with a small-scaled model simply because the huge numbers were a pain to balance and. There are certain parameters that need to all match up to make an internal TG ring system with clouds this way; cloud depth, sin scales, surface layer alt' constraints and simple shape shader sizes(which removes some rings close to the planet's surface) all need to match up relatively. Juggling the huge e+00xx numbers was too much for my little brain to find much fun in for a quick project.
I found great difficulty, for example, creating as convincing a huge sin wave for the rings at this size.
After all, it isn't as if it's a real planet anyway, just zeros and ones, true scale doesn't matter, in this instance.
I believe it's big! Shhh, don't tell anyone.
Cheers!
