Okay, I can't shut up any longer. :-)

First off, the image is awesome. Your ship is great, your nebulae are 
beautiful, and the black hole is trippy-cool.

Now, a personal pet peeve: In space, there is no "ambient" light. 
There's no atmospheric scattering of light, so shadows are *black*. Take 
a look at a crescent moon, and you'll see what I mean.

Almost everybody gets this wrong, including Hollywood. :-) At the same 
time, I think there's some new artistic ground to cover here--you can 
create some *really* dramatic images by fixing the shadows.

The big challenge is making the object still be *visible* when half of 
it is black, and it is against a black background. I'm still kicking 
some ideas around in my head for dealing with this.

You could bend physics a little with the lighting :-) such that both 
edges of the craft are highlighted, outlining it and making the shape 
visible.

Alternatively, you could take the route of not having space actually be 
black. Make the stars a lot more dense, and beef up the nebulae until 
the dark parts of the ship are silhouetted against the background. Take 
a look at this guy's backgrounds: http://www.crimsondark.com (note that 
he gets the shadows wrong, too...)

Finally, you could not go *all* the way, and just darken the shadows as 
far as you can without making them actually disappear.

Or, you being The Incredible Tek, ;-) you could just come up with 
something way better than anything I can imagine.

Anyway, the image is great as it is. Right now it's up there with 
Hollywood. I just feel that you can do one better than Hollywood. :-D

-- 
William Tracy
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You know you've been raytracing too long when you were ever dragged out 
of a theater for yelling "Cheap rasterized graphics!!!" in the middle of 
Toy Story.
Stephan Ahonen

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