CG

I'd be more impressed if you made the texture yourself, but aside from that:

The earth's diameter is about 12,500 km. The atmosphere reaches out about 100km, so at that scale its like a film on the surface of the mesh. What you've done is about right.

The exosphere, the furthest reaches of the atmosphere, extends about 10,000km from the surface - a bit smaller than its diameter in length. So, for about the same distance as the diameter of your mesh, you can (and should) have some light interaction.

Otherwise you're on the right track - specular water, the texture lighting doesn't conflict, etc. (though you'll run into trouble with hard-shaded craters if you move on to barren planets).

I don't think land would reflect that much light, if any.
bump / normals on the cloud looks a bit too strong.

>>543458
How could you possibly create a texture of Earth yourself?

>>543459
>How could you possibly create a texture of Earth yourself?

The same way you paint any kind of texture.

Anyone can take a NASA map and map it to a sphere, that's not impressive. Making new kinds of planets is way more interesting.

>>543460
I've been thinking about creating a planet generator in Substance Designer. Wouldn't be difficult. I think someone has already made one but it's shit.

>>543454
This is what the Earth looks like from ~1 million KM away with the Sun directly behind the camera.

http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/

As a note, the image is made up of 3 different images taken one after another, so the colours aren't perfect (similar effect to chromatic abberation).

>>543460
>Making new kinds of planets
I'm going on the wild assumption that OP chose Earth for a reason. If it wasn't intended to be specifically Earth, you wouldn't try to pass Earth off as a random planet.
Unless you're going for a cartoon look there is no way you would use anything other than a photo image to create a 3D Earth.

>>543458
How about you stop being a muppet for a day, hmm?

File: planet_091811_by_rich35211-d4a5k8e[1].jpg (580KB, 2188x1580px) Image search: [Google]

580KB, 2188x1580px

>>543484
>Unless you're going for a cartoon look there is no way you would use anything other than a photo image to create a 3D Earth.

Yeah because nobody has ever made a render of the earth with their own texture its fucking impossible

You can use procedural generation programs like Vue to get results like pic related, but you can also composite noise textures to get good results.

>>543596
>Yeah because nobody has ever made a render of the earth with their own texture its fucking impossible
Where did i imply it's impossible? Fucking retard.
Show me any example of somebody creating a 3D Earth by sourcing / creating their own textures that looks better than something create by satellite imagery.

>>543596
Jesus christ people need to tone down that bump mapping on their planets. Look at a picture of a planet, any planet, and it's flat as fuck. Even grand canyon looks flat from space.

>>543596
You should make the clouds into a separate layer. It looks like a part of the planet land because of the bump