New render, I really like the reflection on this one.
How did you make the atmosphere? Really nice looking
I’m wanting to make it realistic from any angle, so I really need a volumetric atmosphere.
I was just doing some experiments with physically accurate atmospheres! I got a fantastic result, and you can too 
The trick is actually using volumetrics, because the atmosphere in real life is volumetric. What you want to do is make a sphere a bit larger than your planet, create a spherical gradient texture that has falloff right at the edge (atmosphere thinning into space) and have this define the density of the volume scatter (I multiply the gradient texture by around 1500, you might have to scale it to match you scene. My atmosphere is really thin, like real life. Might even be too thin). Try this to get you started!
The cool thing is that closeups look amazing, you get red sunsets (rayleigh scattering), and you can even position the camera inside the atmosphere and it looks like you’re on the surface of a planet (with sky, sunrise, sunset, etc)!
My latest Earth Render
My atmosphere material node setup
I don’t want to just give you the material, because where would be the fun in that??
But if you really want to check it out. let me know.
I’m going to go post this on the main WIP forum now.
Wow! Best atmosphere I’ve seen made in blender.
I made the clouds with 3 layers, each one somewhat transparent so that it had a little fake volumetric look, I added displacement to the top cloud layer.
That’s a clever way to do it! I’m sure you ran into the roadblock of not being able to define volume density with images. I wish it was possible to sort of just have a spherical image extruded inwards as the third dimension, similar to sphere mapping in blender internal. I bet fully volumetric clouds would look amazing with enough samples.
Yes! That would be so handy
Neato! I definitely think you have better textures for both the surface and the clouds. I used the largest ones I could find, but the colors aren’t very good on the continents.
So great!!! I’m thinking of sending to a tender farm an animation of the camera flying through space and entering the atmosphere. I wish I had more rendering power so I could render these volumetric scenes faster.
Don’t we all…
I think the atmosphere is a little bit too thick on this version. I would suggest toning it down a little bit.
Also, if you want that noise texture to look god with a gradient, try “multiply” or “overlay” blending rather than “mix”
But the real atmosphere doesn’t have such pronounced variations, so I wouldn’t bother.