Digital Art Zone

I’ve been working on the lights with my moons and I think I have a good set up for it now. I used a very large parallel light targeting the smaller moon, made the light infinite with no falloff. The intensity only had to be 3 to get the shadows I wanted, also I excluded the infinite cloud plane and the “atmosphere” of the large moon.

nreed - 30 November 2012 07:48 PM

Opinions and sugestions welcom, mostly about he moons…

Although yours is a fantasy scene (and thus anything goes), from a physics point of view when looking from within a sky, anything darker than the sky must be within that sky. So your moons look like they are objects hanging in the sky rather than being behind the sky. Cool, but not realistic. If you search the web for images of “moon in daylight”, you’ll see how the moon looks behind the sky. When science fiction art smartened up its act in the 1970s, this was one of the changes in style. Nothing wrong with total fantasy moons, of course.

To simulate the “behind the sky” look in Bryce, set the material of the moons to “additive”. This will show only the parts of the moon that are brighter than the sky.

Below is an ancient Bryce4 scene from the last century that I’ve tweaked slightly in Bryce7. Most useful feature of newer Bryce for this was the much brighter sunlight available. Surprising but genuine coincidence of moon positioning and misty gullies. 

I was actually wanting just this effect so thank a bunch for the info on doing it. Great render btw.

As an alternative, 

locate the Bryce moon in a completely black sky, 
in the Light Lab IBL Tab
  Use HDRI Image, Skydome only, Use Sky and export the HDRI

The HDRI with the moon can be used to create a very bright moon in another scene

( Bryce is not currently installed on this PC at work,  so this is from memory )

Well I was unable to get the additive option to function properly in my scene, I think that is because I have an atmosphere layer over the moon/planet with some transparency and this is throwing it off. So I added a 2d square and placed it between the moons and the terrain, applied the nebula material and set the transparency to 50%. THis gave me a good result I thought….

Here I added a ship I threw together….