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Description
Gimli is a small moon that orbits Vanadis. It is made of ice, and reflects 93% of the light. I am attempting to create a continuous LOD so that it is possible to view this moon from the surface in the same scene (I am aware Vue can do this automatically, but I am a lot more familiar with Cycles and Vue's renderer is a biased engine). Right now, the moon is simply made of a ton of polygons and a displacement map provides the shape (peering closely at the terminator will reveal that fact). Once I get that done, I will add geysers and a diffuse ring of ice crystals.

Vanadis's atmosphere uses a combination of absorb and scatter nodes, and a mapping, gradient texture and math node to control the density gradient (the scaling has to be the square root of your volume object's diameter in blender units, the gradient texture has to be set to sphere, and connected to a math node, has to multiply the square of the object's size by 10 to 100, depending on how dense you want your atmosphere). The Volume shader emulates rayleigh scattering if you set the the red, green and blue to scatter at the right ratio. The absorb shader uses the extinction coefficients of water (I could not find the values for methane) to simulate the absorbtion accurately as well. The only problem was that the new atmosphere really brought out the flatness of the cloud map, so I will see about using a particle system to add vertical relief.

Description
Gimli is a small moon that orbits Vanadis. It is made of ice, and reflects 93% of the light. I am attempting to create a continuous LOD so that it is possible to view this moon from the surface in the same scene (I am aware Vue can do this automatically, but I am a lot more familiar with Cycles and Vue's renderer is a biased engine). Right now, the moon is simply made of a ton of polygons and a displacement map provides the shape (peering closely at the terminator will reveal that fact). Once I get that done, I will add geysers and a diffuse ring of ice crystals.

Vanadis's atmosphere uses a combination of absorb and scatter nodes, and a mapping, gradient texture and math node to control the density gradient (the scaling has to be the square root of your volume object's diameter in blender units, the gradient texture has to be set to sphere, and connected to a math node, has to multiply the square of the object's size by 10 to 100, depending on how dense you want your atmosphere). The Volume shader emulates rayleigh scattering if you set the the red, green and blue to scatter at the right ratio. The absorb shader uses the extinction coefficients of water (I could not find the values for methane) to simulate the absorbtion accurately as well. The only problem was that the new atmosphere really brought out the flatness of the cloud map, so I will see about using a particle system to add vertical relief.