Sunsets in Spore

One of my goals on Spore was to make the planets feel like they were swaddled in a blanket of atmosphere.

Seen from orbit, they'd be covered in a translucent layer of air. When you zoomed down to the surface, the sky would fill in above you and become dense and nearly opaque (on the day side, where the light was hitting it, anyway)

To that end, we built this cool atmospheric scattering system. I could tune it to make the atmosphere change color and opacity as a function of your elevation and what direction you were facing relative to the sun (among other things).

I made it so that when you zoomed out a little bit and faced the sun, the air would fill with sunset colors. I was pretty happy with the final result.

Here are a batch of screenshots that I took while working on it.

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