The reason for making it a Good Night dream is that the effect of having the daylight on the horizon is more dramatic that it being night time. The rotation of the Earth dictates that I follow the sun as it sets.


Thanks, I've been playing with it and as Excalpius has already stated, it's hard to get just right. Thats why I started this post   


Thanks for the kind words and it wasn't boring to me   

Master Baron

I updated the image with a new render so you may need to refresh the page to see the new image. Let me know if you think the atmosphere is still too large.

And the render time has now jumped to 200 hours

Looks great, can't wait to see this one!!

I think I like the new one better.

Ahh, looks much better. I think it's still a bit chroma/blue though. The real atmosphere is a bit lighter/whiter from this angle, as it only looks blue to us looking up/out due to red scattering in the atmosphere. Otherwise, this is MUCH better!



For the whole animation or a still?! I hope it is for the whole animation, hehe. Welcome to CGI! I have a 12 CPU render farm behind my sofa.

Seriously though, you might want to check you anti-aliasing settings. Your instincts might me to max those out, yet the textures should render anti-aliased by default and you actually have no hard polygon edges to compensate for because the atmosphere covers them up. Hopefully, some 10 frame tests at much lower settings will make things easier on ya with some lower settings.

Lovely work, mate. Kudos.

Yes, entire render. 12 CPUs, very nice! I have a old dual processor P3 733 PC, but not sure how much time impact it would have on the rendering time.


Your right, I have AA all the way up. I'm getting lots of flicker from the bump mapped mountains that anti-aliasing seems to fix. I haven't spent time finding a happy medium yet. But I'll play with it before doing a full video render.

Thanks and your comments are very helpful!

Master Baron

There may be a "threshold" setting for anti-aliasing if it is "adaptive" in your renderer. You should be able to set it to "focus" on the high-contrast (re: bump mapped) areas while ignoring the flat simple texture mapped areas. Perhaps a 3DSMax forum would be the best source for those specifics, since I'm using terminology from other renderers, but that's the general idea.

Good, the updated image is much better. But still - do you think you could be able to make the atmosphere border a little transparent? I think transparency would make it look even more realistic.

Thanks Intri, I'm still tweaking it and I'll be posting a final shot in the next day or so.

Thanks everyone, I think I got a final product to render.

Cool, looking forward to seeing the results. Good luck with the baking.

I cannot wain to see how nice this will lokk, Thanks for all of your hard work....it really looks ike it will pay off!  

I can't wait!!! I love all of the dreams that have a view of the earth... This could the dream that stays on my desktop for all of eternity!

All I can say is I can't wait! I love Eart dreams, space dreams and nature dreams. Now if only the Nvidia drivers would become more stable, that would be nice too.

Is this the dream you are referring too?
WWW Link
If it is I already have this. Or is this to be a better version of the same such or type of dream.
It is the one and only dream I like. So if yours is better count on me buying it!

SGT