Help: Skybox Render without Surface

[mr_anderson]

Hey everyone. I am trying to render a skybox without the surface of the planet for the project I am working on. I have tried disabling Render Surface, but I seem to get some gnarly artifacts. What would be the best position for my camera? Or is there some settings that I need to tweak, such as GI?

[AP]

It looks to me you do not have enough atmosphere samples.

Your camera if you are rendering a spherical panorama for a skybox should be horizontally even at pitch 0 degrees and at ground level.

[mr_anderson]

Hello Chris,

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, I am trying to avoid the spherical option so that I don't have loss of information or stretching making it into a skybox. I have turned up my atmosphere samples.

[Kadri]

Can't sure without the file but it looks more like Godrays that some are trying to render sometimes without success.
Render a small part with the Planet surface enabled and see. If they are still there they are definitely Godrays.

Try some crop renders with and without the secondary and primary and the other way around in the cloud and-or atmosphere nodes.
Different Shadow options might help too.On-OFF etc. I haven't tried it so all is just a guess.

Edit: If you mean that the lower part is noisy then i would use first higher atmosphere number of samples (as Chris said),
        then higher cloud samples,higher detail rendering ,higher AA settings and higher GI settings,

[mr_anderson]

So I just found out that my project manager does not mind if the surface is showing. He will just cut each sky rendering in half and flip it onto the surface. Thank you for the suggestions.