African eclipse

[Matt]

I would set the size and distance of the moon as realistically as you can. Then the default sunlight's soft shadow diameter (0.5) should give you a pretty good approximation of the umbra and penumbra.

The umbra (solid centre of the shadow) is pretty small, because the Moon appears only very slightly larger than the Sun when viewed from the Earth. But there is a much larger penumbra. Because this umbra is so small, small changes to the soft shadow diameter in Terragen will have big changes on the umbra, so you'd probably want to tweak the numbers carefully to make it realistic. (Or find out a more accurate figure for the sun's angle than 0.5.)

[MF_Erwan]

At first I wanted to have a real eclipse, but Terragen seems to have problems with placing the moon at the correct distance (3.844e+008 m-->too far?). So I made the moon 10 times closer than it really is, and 10 times smaller.

I just tried again with a very simple scene:
sun: heading 300, elevation 25
moon: distance 3.844e+008, diameter 1.737e+006 , heading 300, elevation 25
camera: near (0,0,0)
When I render with those values, it is still daylight, no eclipse!
But if I have moon: distance 3.844e+007, diameter 1.737e+005, no problem! So I think 3.844e+008 is a too big number for Terragen.

Erwan

[dandelO]

At first I wanted to have a real eclipse, but Terragen seems to have problems with placing the moon at the correct distance (3.844e+008 m-->too far?). So I made the moon 10 times closer than it really is, and 10 times smaller.

Transfer the distance(or a little bigger) to the radius of the 'background' sphere node. '-3.844e+008'. The Moon is hiding behind it.