i made this for the eon cg challenge on cgtalk.com. for the geometry i used the internal renderer, only the lensflare needed some photons from yafray. 
click image for full size: 1280x544
here is also some video (xvid):
http://www.kaikostack.com/ftp/Temp/eon.avi
for wireframes, layers etc. look here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=214&t=444658&page=1&pp=15
the rainbow is distracting. And what’s with that white swirly stuff at the bottom?
that’s gas. :yes:
i’ve explained some of my thoughts in the cgtalk thread.
That is really cool, especially the video. However I do agree that the rainbow is distracting.
And what thoughts were those, for those of us too lazy to search through cgtalk, i dont mind the rainbow flair, it reminds me of the armageddon video.
from the thread:
I didn’t read the book so everthing I know about the asteroid is, that it’s 300 kilometers long and 100 kilometers in diameter.
The idea is that the asteroid is part of an earlier planetoid, which has been broken apart millions of years ago for whatever reason. The former core segment consists of frozen gases, which are slowly vaporizing in earth orbit through the sun radiation. Earlier the asteroid hasn’t had such crystallin structures like on the image, those has been grown over all the time flying through space and passing stars which caused chemical reactions.
Since in space no turbulences can be because of the vacuum, I made it straight gas jets instead of a gas cloud as in the concept sketch.
I only used the regular edit functions such as proportional editing of blender. Sculpt was to unstable to use at this time. For the crystals I used the proportional editing together with random falloff and simply pulled them out of the highly subdivided geometry. The little craters scattered all over the asteroid are a mix of displacement and bump maps.
Cheers, i think this looks really great as that large thumbnail you’ve got, the details don’t quite stand up to the higher resolution of your full sized version.
I simply love all of this. The video is awesome too. How did you get the glow around the asteroid? It looks amazing. Cheers and great job!