[Steve Bentley]

For the reflection on the water you might have better luck with a reflecting object back their like a disk with a circular grad on it that goes from white center to black outisde. (make it invisible to camera with a compositing tag) In the real world so little is an actual specular highlight and it always looks more real when it’s a reflection of something bright instead of the hack of a spec highlight.

[Steve Bentley]

I think the spec level is good but the size is probably too big (too big a circle). I would reduce the bump though unless this isn’t antialiased. Always check this kind of thing with your final antilaliasing level as it will soften the points in the sparklies.

[Steve Bentley]

I think the spec level is good but the size is probably too big (too big a circle). I would reduce the bump though unless this isn’t antialiased. Always check this kind of thing with your final antilaliasing level as it will soften the points in the sparklies.

From a Tech Director stand point: its pretty common to go for this level of bump because it feels like something to you as an artist, but from orbit you really can’t see that level of mountain bumpyness – you can barely see dimensionality in the clouds and the atmo is crazy thin – if the earth were a basketball the entire atmo would be the thickness of an apple skin.
Thats not to say it can’t look like anything you want.

For the reflection on the water you might have better luck with a reflecting object back their like a disk with a circular grad on it that goes from white center to black outisde. (make it invisible to camera with a compositing tag) In the real world so little is an actual specular highlight and it always looks more real when it’s a reflection of something bright instead of the hack of a spec highlight.

[Steve Bentley]

Ah, I’ve opened the file now. We normally turn on multipass. You only have the standard save turned on. Also you might want to include an RGBA pass in the multi pass just to be sure. We find it renderes sometimes and sometimes not so there’s no downside to including it. Also try using a Pshop file and then you will get all your passes as layers.

I don’t have the redishift plug in so I cant test what you are seeing.

[Steve Bentley]

Follow up – it could be the bump is too high on your ocean and that’s where the sparkles are coming from.

It seems there is more specular on the mountains than there should be so it ends up looking like plasticene – is it these slight brightnings on the mountain slopes that you are talking about? If you kill the spec on the landmasses completley that should go away. Generally only the water gets any spec on a planet render.

[Steve Bentley]

Thanks Brian, I did try that – it was my first “this will work” without even thinking. But it didn’t do anything.
The texture map on the light itself work brilliantly – even if it was somewhat clumsy to get the look I wanted.

Here’s a follow up – I’m finding the diminishment of the visible light as the light peters out to be quite harsh. I’ve tried combining the standard falloff (which doesn’t seem to have an effect on the visible volumetrics – both linear and inversSQ), I’ve also tried using the texture map I wrapped around it to add some more tape to the falloff – this did work but the ending of the light is still fairly abrupt. I realize it’s a cheat and that the volumetric is just a smear of whatever shape it’s passing through (and I have my samples down to 5 so i don’t get popping when it animates).
Is there a trick or is it just the nature of the beast? A cone of light that tapers at the wide end to nothing reminds me of a cube of aerogel where the edges are almost not there yet you know there is a hard wall there ending the volume, especially if you aren’t looking side on at the cone and you can see some of the ellipse of the cone cross section.

To be fair it might be that I’ve got the apex of the cone cranked so that I get a good bloom of the color of the light soaking out to almost light saber white.

[Steve Bentley]

How are you extracting the channels? And what format are you rendering too? (sorry I haven’t opened the project yet)
There’s a free AE plug in called extractor that will pull out each channel that is embedded in the rendered files.
It also could be that the format you have chosen doesn’t have the ability to render multiple channels within it. Pshop can, EXR can but jpg for instance cannot.

We have had issues where we don’t get a RGB channel if we don’t specify one in the multi pass and then other times we get those channels even though we haven’t specified.

If you have multipass checked and are ignoring the upper save area you should be getting either multiple files each with a channel extension or a single file with embedded channels that are not immediately viewable.

[Steve Bentley]

That looks right to me – with me assuming you have some reflection going on.
Is the issue the mountain tops mid frame that are just peeking into the suns light? or the sparkly areas bottom left. I assumed these were reflections being picked up from some sky map or spherical (but invisible) reflector with a reflection image on it. Or did I miss something altogether?

The sparkle could be causes by the reflection image not spanning the sky or global sphere reflection object (I should explain this – we usually put a giant sphere around every project and make it invisible to the camera but has a spherical reflection image mapped on to it. So it can act as a GI light source or reflection map). If you just slap a texture on a giant sphere sometimes it will repeat a billion times and you need to right click on the texture tag and say fit to object.
The other thing it might be is that you have all this great bump or displacement info going on in the mountains but the smooth water surfaces are perfectly fat polys (Ok, ok, every poly is perfectly flat) but the ones in the lowlands or water might be much larger than the rest and if there is no bump map in that area (even a hint of one) each poly will only reflect one pixel from what ever there is to reflect across it’s entire surface, and that can create a sparkle or a chaotically changing reflection.

[Steve Bentley]

And can’t you just drag on the value itself – sort of a slider without the clutter of a slider?

[Steve Bentley]

Got it.
Wrapped a transparent grad texture around the light itself using a cylindrical mapping.