creating a sense of distance
 

Hello all,

I had a few questions about creating a sense of long distances, or the illusion thereof for my next personal project.

The project is a scene from a book I read. It's going to be a Rider on a Gravity Bike in the foreground with a star ship in the background. The area the rider is in is a burned out wasteland.

So my biggest question is how to scale the scene so that the area appears large without making the bike/rider incredibly small. Or should I do three separate scenes one for the ship, one for the wasteland, and one for the bike and rider?

The end result is going to be a picture so The latter seems like a more prudent method since all three can be then composited in photoshop. But I'm still curious as to how to create large areas. Any ideas, and comments would be greatly appreciated!

I've already started the basic layout of the scene to get a feel of what will go where, an idea of where the focus will be, vanishing point and what not but its been slow going. (Okay I'll admit that I've been REACHing for the xbox controller more than I've been learning maya :p ) Bad Wolfgang!

Haze. Objects start to shift to x color as the distance increases, on Earth it's blue on Mars it's most likely red? :P Scale is one thing, but I think that is very important as well. Render layers aren't always fun but they're an option.