A Planet Atmosphere Tutorial with Gaffer by D.M.S. Foreward      Unfortunately, I don't have time to write a full-on tutorial with detailed images and such, but this should still be plenty of information to show how this works. I'd consider 90% of the techniques in this to be quite easy as long as you have used a little bit of Lightwave before.      We're going to create earth, it's clouds, and it's atmosphere. Part - I. Modeling      To start, we're going to create 3 balls; one for each element. Personally, I see no reason to create this to scale (as it sometimes makes a hassle when we animate), so I use these specs instead: Earth ball xyz radius: 100m tesselation: 3 or above (I'd recommend 4) We have to make sure we have plenty of polygons to make everything smooth. After the ball is created, give it a surface called "earth_planet". Save this object as "earth_planet". Cloud ball xyz radius: 101.5m tesselation: 3 or above surface: "earth_clouds" Save As: "earth_clouds" Atmosphere ball xyz radius: 105m tesselation: 3 or above surface: "earth_atmosphere" Before saving, flip all of this object's polygons ("f" key). Save As: "earth_atmosphere"      That's all the modeling. Simple, no? II. Layout Setup      In Layout, start a new scene. Add a Null object, and rename it to "earth_parent". (To rename a Null, go to Save Object in the Objects panel) Load all three of the elements that you just created. Parent the earth_atmosphere to the earth_parent. Parent the earth_planet to the earth_parent. Parent the earth_clouds to the earth_planet. (This way, if earth rotates, the clouds go with it.)      In the Lights panel, change the Ambient light to 2% 255,255,255. Rename the default light to "sun;" and make it a point light; 100% Intensity; 255,255,255. Add a second point light named "atmo sphere;" 100% Intensity; 124,194,233. Parent both of these lights to earth_parent. Move the sun light to approximately: X=-400m, Y=200m, Z=0. Move the atmosphere light to approximately: X=400m, Y=-200m, Z=0.      See what you did? The two lights should be opposite each other in relation to the earth. Here's why... III. Surfacing and Texturing      Before going any further, you need 3 images. These images are quite popular and shouldn't be too difficult to find if you don't already have them. The first is the earth's texture map (earth_text.bmp), the second is the cloud's transparency map (earth_clouds_trans.bmp), and the third is the cloud's texture map (earth_clouds_text.bmp). They should be very similar to these three respectively: earth_text.bmp earth_clouds_trans.bmp earth_clouds_text.bmp      Here are the setting that each surface should have: earth_clouds: Texture Map: earth_clouds_text.bmp using spherical coordinates Luminosity: 1.5% Diffuse: 64% with Sharp Terminator Specular: 0% Reflectivity: 0% Transparency: 100% Transparency Map: earth_clouds_trans.bmp at 80% Opacity using spherical coordinates Bump Map: earth_clouds_trans.bmp using spherical coordinates and an Amplitude of 50% Smoothing: On Edge Transparency: transparent with an edge threshold of 0.1 (Advanced Options tab) Glow Effect: 37% (Advanced Options tab) earth_planet: Texture Map: earth_text.bmp using spherical coordinates Luminosity: 0% Diffuse: 65% with Sharp Terminator Specular: 8% Glossiness: 256 Reflectivity: 0% Transparency: 0% Smoothing: On Glow Effect: 63% earth_atmosphere: Color: 106,159,219 Luminosity: 0% Diffuse: 76% with Sharp Terminator Specular: 0% Reflectivity: 0% Transparency: 27% Smoothing: On Edge Transparency: Transparent with an edge threshold at 0.4 Glow Effect: 100% IV. The Secret      Now, here's the secret, and this is why you MUST have the Gaffer plugin or something very similar. You set up two lights, each on opposite sides of the planet. One light will light the atmosphere, and one will light the planet and clouds. You'll use the Gaffer plugin to do something called "selective lighting."      Open up the Surfaces panel again.      Select the earth_planet surface. In the Advanced Options tab, add the Shader plugin "Gaffer" and hit its Options button.      In the upper left corner, locate the "Light Intensity Adjustments" section. Under the word Prefix, type in "atmo" without the quotes (this points gaffer to the light "atmo sphere."      Make sure Falloff and Boost are both 0%. At the bottom of this section is the word "Other." For this, make sure Falloff is 0%, and Boost is 100%. Hit Continue at the bottom of the Gaffer window.      Select the earth_clouds surface and give it the exact same settings as the earth_planet.      Finally, select the earth_atmosphere surface.      These Gaffer settings will be just the opposite. For the prefix, type in "sun" without the quotes; Falloff and Boost to 0%. For Other, make Falloff 0% and Boost 100%.      Now, close the Surfaces panel and go to the Effects panel. Enable the Glow Effect. The Glow Intensity should be 150%, and the Glow Radius should be 15 pixels (for a 640x480 render, or equivalent).      That's it!      Do some renders and play with the settings all you want. Tip 1      Keep in mind that your rendering will only be as good as your image maps. Don't try to do a close-up of your home town or you'll just get a mess of ugly pixels. Tip 2      I believe that a bug in Gaffer causes problems when trying to render this scene with dual or more processors. For some reason, it adds a bunch of nasty "noise." Tip 3      Because Lightwave does "dumb" glows, meaning that it just slaps a glow all over an object no matter where it is, I recommend rendering space and it's planets first, then going back and rendering all of your spaceships over the top. Otherwise, you'll notice that all of the edges of anything in front of the planet will be "glowed over," which probably wouldn't happen in real life unless the object was actually in the atmosphere.      To do this, just set up your scene as usual, but before rendering, save two versions. Once version has all the stars, planets, and nebulae, and the other has all of your ships and such. Render out the space scene first, then import all of those frames into your second version (that has all of your ships, etc.) as an image sequence. Just use the image sequence as a background image in Effects>Compositing, then render.      The whole trick to this is making sure your camera does the EXACT same movements in both scenes. This way they will composite flawlessly. Tip 4      When adding stars and such, I find that sometimes it helps to make most of the stars a very light blue instead of pure white (or other colors). Along those lines, sometimes I make space just a TAD blueish, instead of the plane old black. A little blue goes a long way, though, so don't overdo it. Try dark dark dark blackish-blue. As you can see, this technique also works well for other planets. dms@magesticimaging.com Go to the Warp Star Tutorial Go to the Ocean Water Tutorial Go to the Space Explosion Tutorial