Learning to crawl (fly)

 It's taken the whole weekend to sync data and install a handful of games. 

Blender assets are mostly in place, so I should be able to get cracking...

New plugin alert! Physical Celestial Objects -- early access

This comes from the team that created Physical Atmosphere and starlight. On the strength of how good that add-on is, I jumped straight onto this early access version of PCO.

This works in a completely weird way, but when you see the results you understand why this is the way to go. Instead of created a false-scale planet in your scene, this generates the planet in the background -- because planets are obviously behind the scane of geometry. The optical physics part of the planet is great, the ring system is great. It's missing a lot but the potential is amazing.

Bagapie scatter scenes just work, now. I mean they don't become slow after a couple of moderately dense layers.

Playing with quick-and-easy terrain. The material is beach rock from Wales.

So this was the first try. It used adaptive subdiv and I might have got the settings too high. It took 20 minutes to render and took more than 30GB of memory. OOPS!! It doesn't even look good, but that's probably because the maps are not intended for super detail.