When placing a planet between the sun and the camera that planet becomes basically invisible. I came accross this when moving the sun with a planet in orbit. I moved it behind that planet and a testrender just showed clear skies.
I would think that's because you're seeing the dark side of the planet - it's like an eclipse. You can probably remedy this by turning off some of the shadow casting options in the light source, but this will probably have a negative impact on other aspects of your scene. We do hope to add per-object lighting and shadow controls for the final release.
- Oshyan
The problem is not an eclipse. I would love to see an eclipse. My point is that when the sun is directly behind the second planet(i.e. moon) it's like it's not there. The planet isn't casting a shadow on the 'root' planet so to speak. Could it be related to the sun shining through the ground bug?
Yes, it could very well be. Have you tried turning on Ray-trace Shadows in the Atmosphere Quality tab? That's the solution for the other bug, of course. Not sure if it would help here. Unfortunately I can't test this stuff right now as I have a demanding render going.
- Oshyan
Hmm, it seems to have been a one time thing for some reason. After your answer I decided to do some more experiments and now when second planet is between the camera and the sun it goes dark like expected. ??? ??? So it may have been just a quirk before.
edit: ok, I think I found it. Disabling the atmosphere for the moon makes the planet transparent so I'm not in the shadow anymore!
Example of the eclipse :) Looks cool eh! As you can see it take a bit of fidling since 0.005 degrees in heading makes alot of difference.
just fyi, this fails when you disable the atmosphere on the second planet even if the sun is completely hidden by it.
(http://temp.theglasseye.nl/eclipse.jpg)
Only question now is, why is my solar disc so jagged?
Currently the "solar disc" function is a bit simplistic, and the facility for dealing with ultra-bright surfaces is also not yet optimized. So for extremely bright things like the sun, where a proper corona or halo isn't making the edges smooth, you get very sharp edges. This can also happen with very bright skies against the terrain or luminous surface edges. We plan to implement better antialiasing of such bright elements in the future, possibly including "bloom" or other such effects to better deal with these problematic areas.
- Oshyan
Man, i wonder which surprises does TG2 brings us in the next month. I really love it. Just great!