Wow, an amazing look for 3D. Would love to see your SBS before I vote. Good luck.

You haven't included in your SBS how you textured your objects to achieve the painterly look of this render. The material on Charon's arm also seems to have a mapping issue.

Hi Mad, yes you are right that the arm of Charon has a mapping issue, only I accepted this. When I solved the mapping problem of Charon became less appealing.
The painterly look of the background is achieved by adding the a terrain and slide this partly underneath the plane surface. This infinite plane has a multi channel shader with a blue transparent color and a waves bump setting. The waves amplitude & frequency setting is very low. In this way the shadow of the boat smoothly interacts with terrain underneath the water surface.
In the background there is a fog, in this fog I placed my transparent ghosts figures. I wanted to have my ghosts and the fog gently compete with each other to attract some the attention.
The clothing is a multi channel color shader with a bump texture setting.
The skin is a multi channel mixer with a blender value setting.
I will add the texture settings later this evening.

Fantastic piece author...gl

nice one...gl

nice idea...gl

Certainly this is a good image. I read the SBS, and really would suggest turning the bump map down to at least 3, if using 3ds max. At the moment the planet looks a little noisy. Also for the material, I would change the shader from "Blinn" to "Phong" and set the specularity to 22 and the glossiness to 22. This will give a more realistic shine and reflect to the Earth. I don't know what render engine your using, But if your using Vray click the area shadows box and play with the UVW values to soften the transition from night to day. But overall a beautiful image.

cool shapes author and very nice combination of elements....GL

This really is a good effort. I'm not really up on C4D, but could with a few tweaks to the particle system used for the fire this could be great. Well don author.

Very nice render!

Thanks

cool

I love the color in this one. Very nice