Mist:

These four buttons defines how the texture will be mixed with general parameters. Mist ignores troubles you can have with the location of the horizon line, as seen before. You jsut have to add a plane with a high size value in order to get your ground. Of course, the junction between the plane and the sky can't be very realist. But by tweaking a little the mist settings, you can make sure that the bad-looking junction is hidden by the mist. You can then create a 'World' environment like the one on the pic on the right.

Once this is done, set the 'Mist' button to 'on' and make a render to get the strange result on the left. This is a normal situation. The world texture has been moved to the foreground. First thing to do is to increase the 'Sta' parameter, because it defines the distance between the camera and the location where the mist starts to show (the following values are the one used in this example, but the depends heavily on the size of your scene). Set 'Sta' to 70 and the result will be a little more good looking.

The 3 parameter buttons defines how the mist behaves.

'Quad': Stands for quadratic progression. The more you get away from the camera, the more the mist gets thicker.

'Lin': Linear progression. The progression of the mist is constant.

'Sqr': Square root progression. You should use this setting if you want to get an underwater effect.

The three following pics show the slight differences between 'Quad', 'Lin', and 'Sqr'. 'Unified render' also has a slight influence on the mist effect. It has been activated for each of these three pictures. Please note the difference between the rendering of the square bases on the first pic and the one on the last previous picture on the right.

The last button is 'Hi'. If the 'Hi' value is different than 0, the mist spread is given a maximum heigth value. The low values (pic1: Hi=0.4) are not so good looking. Pic 2: Hi=60 gives better results. Pic 3: 'Hi' is set to 90. 'Unified Render' was set 'on' for these 3 pictures.

Some stars in the mist ? The two effects don't get along very well... On the left, with the standard rendering engine, the result is very bad looking. On the right, with the 'Unified Render' it's even worse. Nobody's perfect, just forget about this combo...

Planets in the mist ? It's a better idea. Please note that mist hides everything on the background, so there are two solutions: on the left, the 'No Mist' material setting is 'on' for the two planets. This is not very good looking, because of the edges of the plane that show again. Setting the 'Hi' parameter will help with a satisfactory result !