Planetary Rings

Planetary Rings A method of creating planetary rings by modifying a Preset Material. These operations were carried out using Bryce 4.
	The image at the left shows the effect that we are after. Not a torus in sight.
Create a suitable background for your ringed planet. Select Custom Sky, set sky colour to black, set haze to zero and deselect any clouds.
	Enter Skylab and select a starfield. Select the ground plane and delete it. You should now have a black background with stars when you render.
	Now create a 2D horizontal disc. Raise the disc, enlarge it and rotate it to suit.
	Apply the Lit Rays material to the disc. You'll find it in the Complex fx group of materials, see image to left.
	If you render now you'll see something like the image to the left.This is not the effect we are after - (might be useful for modelling a CD).
	With the disc selected, click on [M] to enter the Material Editor. Click as, shown to the left, to bring up the Transformation Tools for Texture B. Set the Z Rotation Value to 90. Exit the Material Editor and render.
	Now this is looking more like what we want but we're not quite there yet.
	If you lower your disc nearer the bottom of the image area you will notice that when you render the image the lower part of the rings disappears. This is due to the blending effect caused by channels A and C when they interact with channel B.
	To remove this effect click on [M] to enter the Material Editor and click on the Channel B Ambience marker. This will cause the Channels A and C markers to disappear. Exit the material editor and render.
	Now there is no fading of the rings towards the bottom of the image and the disc can be placed anywhere in the image.
	Now create a sphere and size and texture it. To centre the sphere in the disc select both and click on the centering button.
In the image at the top of this tutorial I have set all the Diffuse, Ambient and Specular colours to white. I have also increased the transparency to about 11%. Once you have completed this tutorial I suggest you save the rings material in your User material group for future use. Have fun ....... Peter.