Opacity Tiling Problem

[J-Dude]

I'm working to make a model of Earth circa 250 million years into the future, which has shifted it's continents into an arrangement reffered to as "Pangea Ultima", and I've found a texture and made an assortment of maps, even maps for clouds and a shader for an atmosphere effect. It's composed of a number of spheres layered on top of each other.

I'm nearly done with it, except I'm getting an odd and unwanted effect that the opacity of the cloud map and the atmosphere shader object seem to cause. When either of these objects are visible, this ugly tiling appears in the geometry of the underlying layers, as if the smoothing had become faceted. This disappears once the offending objects are hidden, as shown here:


Earth Ultima, with the objects visible and their unwanted effect.
http://i390.photobucket.com/albums/oo350/JJMDude/withtiling.jpg

Earth Ultima, with both objects hidden, preventing the above issue.
http://i390.photobucket.com/albums/oo350/JJMDude/without.jpg


I'm at a loss, I can't understand why this is happening. I've never seen it before, and I'd really appreciate it if someone were to help me out here.

Anyone please?

 

[blesser]

i like the first one... but ...

 

[Damaera]

Sir, I'm going to have to arrest you for looking at the pictures and ignoring the text.

 

[Mephisto]

Sir, I'm going to have to arrest you for looking at the pictures and ignoring the text.

how.... Just how does that differ from what you do :-/

 

[Damaera]

how.... Just how does that differ from what you do :-/

Mephisto, Sir J-Dude asked for help, not which version is better.

 

[KYnetiK]

how.... Just how does that differ from what you do :-/

Spanky has a badge, handcuffs, a taser, and an unhealthy sadomasochistic sexual apetite... 'Nuff said.

 

[J-Dude]

Thanks for the clarification and non-idiocy, folks who bothered to read. This is at least a better response than anything I've gotten from cgtalk.

I hope that the problem at hand comes into the conversation though.

 

[Grega]

I aint really into art but. You said its layerd. Is there a chance of impurities on the layer?

 

[J-Dude]

I don't believe so, but it doesn't matter now.

A guy on CG talk said it looked like something happening with the shadows, and that inspired me to alter some settings and eventually exclude the atmosphere and cloud object layers from receiving shadows. I think this will do. I can worry about lower-res textures and unfortunate bump-pixelation later.

 

[Damaera]

If there aren't going to be any up close shots, you could probably just texture all of the detail.