Night skies

#1 I got a decent looking night sky once by taking a cloudy day sky, making it darker, and then turning the tint to a more uniform blue (I think cinimatographers do the same thing sometimes, you see it a lot in old westerns). Then I replaced the sun with a moon of course :). Where there weren't clouds I made stars by making a speckly texture in Photoshop using an airbrush set to "dissolve." This was all done with individual models placed in 3DS Max, and then rendered out as six reflection maps. So the stars were mapped onto a shallow dome in Max, and placed behind the other models, which had stuff like clouds and such. The cloud models had alpha to let you see through to the stars.

Not sure if you're up for that much hands-on art making, but maybe it'll help :)

-Spener

#2 A quick search of ' night terragen ' (no quotes) discovered several entries, including this. :-)

Best of luck!

-Eric

#3 Thanks a lot, guys, I had lost the hope in this thread.

@Spencer, thanks for the valuable tips. I'm up to hands-on work, my real problem is Max. In our team, the DTS modelling is not mine. But your answer was useful even for a tool like Bryce.

@Eric, shame on me, dude, I should have found that "Night Falls" tut. It's just that sometimes these Google searches makes you drown in results, it's hard to find the right one. Thanks a lot.