I have always wondered what it would be like to be on a planet and in the sky there would be an arch stretching from horizon to horizon - the planet's ring system. It may not at all be visible due to the albedo factor of the ring material. For it to appear as such, it would probably be mostly water ice. And maybe not too spectacular to see.
The rings are nine disc objects. I tried toying with opacity and reflectivity and got some strange zigzag artifacts, so other than colors I left settings on the default shaders as is. It's somehow not exactly the effect I was trying for. I'd like to have a more delicate pinstriping without adding more discs.
Okay - I'll admit I don't much like the way the ring-disc objects look on that one. So after a bit of work, I got them around a planet in the sky. The planet casts its shadow on the rings and the rings cast shadows on the planet. There is one catch however. In order to make the rings visible at various angles, I had to adjust their opacity and color. Under certain lighting angles, some weird striping occurs in the planet's shadow. But I think it's not too bad at all.
Very cool!
I like the first one a bit more because of it's majestic and extraterrestrial impression.
I had many experiments with planetary rings as well. Using an Glassshader combined with an imagemap of the saturn rings for colors and one for masking I got not too bad results. But I got shadows even where the alpha mask should hold out everything and make the used plane 100% tranparent. On the bright side of the planet It looked as I wanted... Strange. Perhaps you have more patience to try more settings. The surface layer needed some luminosity and I set the glass shader to 0 reflectivity.
Just how I did it - perhaps it helps you:
Zwischenablage-1.jpg
I've never been able apply an image map to the rings. Just puts a grainy look to them and nothing else. I'll cut my losses and run. But thanks so much for sharing your insight!