First scene update!

I've been working on the first scene some. I've learned quite a bit, and made some good progress. I have previously posted renders of the satellite and the earth, but never combined, as one was in Blender Internal render engine, and the other was rendered in Cycles. It turns out that compositing them is actually pretty easy. Here are some early renders, I'm pretty excited about this:

And, just for fun, here it is again with the alpha channel:

(I don't know how the blog will display the alpha channel. I uploaded it as a .png, which supports alpha channel as well as the standard RGB. In the Linux image viewer it has a nice alpha checkered background)

I'll try to post a link to the blend file soon, which brings up a question; are we willing to use Blendswap for this movie, or should we stick to posting or e-mailing links to Google Docs? Please reply in the comments below.

Here's a screenshot of the node setup, as you can see, nothing too complicated, right?

Wrong! (and only one of the node groups is expanded!)

I just figured out how to use node groups, and it can drastically cut down on clutter in the node chain.

Asteroid to be added soon!