Jouni Pousi wrote:

> What a wonderful image!

thank you :-)

> What was your technique for making the Sun?

Please find attached, then say light_source { ... looks_like Sun }

> I've
> made some experiments with using media for the sun, but I've never
> gotten anything that looks as good as that. On the other hand, the sun
> could be somewhat less bright and it might be good to make the grains
> more visible. Although this is propably a fake-color image, here's a
> good example of how grainy the sun is:
> http://www.phy.duke.edu/courses/313/table-images/soho-image-of-sun.jpg .

Yes, I guess I tried to go halfway between the false-color Soho type
images and the real thing.

> Also it might look good if you included some solar prominences like seen
> in the bottom left of the image (and share the code ;-) .

I'll make a try for some prominences, probably some fractal approach,
I remember seeing some fractal concrete that looked close in shape,
I need to look around a bit.

> I'm not sure if the orrery is supposed to contain all the planets, but
> Mercury is the first planet in the solar system, not Venus. As far as I
> know, Mercury would have been well known when orreries were made. And
> Jupiter is the fifth in the solar system, not Saturn. On the other hand
> the rings of Saturn are absolutely wonderfully implemented, and it would
> be a shame to remove Saturn from the image. Also, the relative sizes of
> the planets seem a bit off - the radius of Mars is just 0.54 times the
> radius of Earth, and Venus about 0.95.

An Orrery would contain all the planets, if you look closely at the
central pillar you'll see spare bands for Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus,
Neptune and even Pluto; I was thinking of running rods in various
directions out of frame (Mercury would be behind the sun) to hint
at their presence, but it might get cluttered, also there's all
the moons of Saturn to consider...
I really just wanted to get a selection of the most interesting
planets in the picture, and Jupiter lost out to Saturn :-)

As for scale, I'd tried lots of approaches: log, sqrt and cube roots
of the actual distances and diameters, none of them worked very well.
In the end I just settled for "X is bigger than Y" and left it at that.

> The color of the athmosphere of Venus doesn't seem quite right, either.
> While Venus does look almost when viewed through a telescope, I'm not so
> sure if the actual color of the athmosphere would be as white when
> viewed from space. Here's an image:
> http://perso.wanadoo.fr/youpie/systsol/venus1.jpg . I couldn't find info
> on whether or not that image has fake colour, so you propably should ask
> someone else about that. :-)

hmm, maybe it is true colour, I'd always thought of it as a blue-ish
white though, and that has a better contrast with the other planets.

> The wooden paneling in the back wall has a very similiar colour to the
> table, and because of that, the table "blends" with the wall. Also, the
> frames of the pictures in the backround seem quite flat. Have you
> considered adding glass panels in front of the pictures? The reflections
> might look quite nice (but admittedly slow down render times). Also, how
> about dimming the general lighting and allowing the Sun to light most of
> the image? That might give the image some more athmosphere.

Yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm least happy about the room itself.
I'll experiment.

> Hopefully I'm not too "harsh" in my critizism. ;-)

Not at all, thank you for your suggestions.

-- 
I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids!

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