Ship Running from Shockwave Improved

Good suggestions from Rashad. I would add that maybe the banding seen in the image could perhaps be reduced by turning on the 48 bit dithering in the rendering option, and/or, not compressing the image so much. Avoid, saving the image from bryce as a jpg, that tends to give poor quality results, instead, take the image in bmp format and convert it in a paint package (I use PSP8 which cost me all of ?5) this offers good control over the compression and conversion process.

Improved for sure. It seems to me that there are two distinct things going on. First is the explosion that causes the shock wave in the first place. It could be two planets crashing together. It could be a ship with a warp core rupture. Something must happen to cause explosion. You need to decode what that is. There should be a bright purple light source centered inside the shockwave sphere on the left side of the screen. It needs to be very bright. I remember an explosion submitted by Richter that dealt with shockwaves. Light must actually radiate from inside the shockwave. There is no light radiating from inside this shockwave so the shockwave does not make sense the way you likely intend for it to. The second thing going on is the Sun itself. You did interpret that suggestion correctly. I like the sun you've added though I wonder what you might do about the banding of the halo? I would make the sun itself white so that it appears hot like a star. In the end there should be 2 extremely bright spots in the scene. One on the left from inside the shockwave as the energetic source of the shockwave, and one on the right side from the distant yet powerful sun. Both of these lights will appear to be behind the spaceship from our point of view, which means that you may need a very weak secondary light behind the camera to illuminate the ship. A very weak light about strength 1 or 2. I would disable the ambient in the materials lab. Have Fun!