[StratComm]

My guess would be the shadows of some of the planet's moons.  They may also be storms of some kind, but the seperation that develops between one shot and the next indicates something above the surface in approximately orbital motion.  Unless of course you mean the black spot in the composite above the rings, which if I am not mistaken is the shadow of the rings themselves (remembering that contrast has been exaggerated in making the composite)

[Carl]

when making gas giants, don't use bump maps.

[Sesquipedalian]

Those are excellent, Lt. Cannonfodder.

I've always been pround of this:

Note, it is an in-game screenshot.

[Singh]

oh....my......god.....
THAT IS SWEET!!!!!!!
How did you manage to get those asteroids like that???

[Carl]

Particles, I'd have to guess. It looks kind of like an in-game screenshot to me.

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Thanks, Ses! Very nice looking screenie

I guess I'm not that good at making gas giants (yet). I should propably make more solid planetoids, they did look much better anyway.

[Bobboau]

Originally posted by Carl
when making gas giants, don't use bump maps.

if this was directed at me,
the last two wern't gas gian'ts I just realy liked the way they looked and fel like shareing, on the others, I find it adds a good bit of detail if you have a faint bump map, look at the clouds near the polar section of the yellow one.

[phreak]

sesq's planet screen is from one of my missions in the Scroll of Atankharzim.  A demo is almost complete and it will feature that.

What we did for that mission is to use an asteroid field to simulate flying near the rings and then we used some bitmaps.  it looks sweet ingame.

[Sesquipedalian]

Carl is right, the background images were generated using particles in 3dsmax (back when it wasn't corrupted--really wish I had something to reinstall it with).  

Basically, I made a short donut and stuffed as many particles into the sucker as my CPU could handle, and then took renders of it.  That background is actually made out of four different bitmaps so that it fills fully half of the sky in the mission.

[jdjtcagle]

Wow...
Sesq that is very, very cool