So, here’s a world made of water -it’s an offshoot from another model I made… (rendererd in blender 2.5)
If this is a shot of the planet from space, I think the specular highlights are too large in some areas.
It might look a lot better if you add in some cloud cover.
Yeah, I’m kinda stumped on that… (like… how I would do the clouds and working on how they fade depending on where the lights are… while keeping them at least volumetric looking instead of flat…
If you search the blender open material library for “Earth” you’ll find two pretty good set-ups that will require some work, but I’m sure you’ll learn a lot. For the clouds you could use some high resolution photos and make a UV map to line them up how you’d like. Make sure that while you’re working with your photo that you save it in a format that supports transparency, or else you’re working for nothing.
Also, from the lighting, the waves on the Earth look like they’d reach miles into the air. Tone down the spec/nor distance, add some spec noise and add more color, as if you could almost see were the land used to be, as if it’s cold water here and warm water there, it makes the Earth have “character”. Or that’s what I would do. Do you need some help with any of that, or do you know the power of search, because either way, the more you know the more we know.