Hi! I’ve been a member of the forums for quite a while now but I have had never posted anything.
So I decided to share my attempt on rendering a Planet Physically Correctly.
Right now, my approach is purely Procedural using Noises for Landmasses and clouds.
I used Volumetric Absorption and Scatter to simulate real life atmosphere.
Cloud Patterns are not the best thing ever, but they’ll do for now
I overlooked the height of the atmosphere, Atmosphere is oddly high at the horizon
I’m impressed by those clouds
This is really fun and I think you have some successes! Recently I’ve been playing quietly with the same sort of thing but haven’t gotten clouds to behave yet at all this well.
There was some talk about the procedural generators in Blender not being well suited to landscape creation on a planet scale. I’m curious to hear what you decide as you move forward.
Thanks! I already have some progress with the atmosphere, now its doesnt have a solid “brickwall” instead eases out just like in real life.
The clouds are fairly simple in this case, I used two noise layers with some distortion settings with the “scale” being controlled by a texture mapper with x y = 0 but z 1
for the details, its just another noise texture as bump displacement. I’ll uploaded something later 
Some progress, this time I wanted to make non-atmospheric bodies. MOONS!
Here is an entirely procedural moon complete with craters and other interesting features.
For now, the material is set to simulate Earth’s Moon.
This serves as a proof of concept on the approach of making planet scale landscapes. the workflow is the same, just a bit more complex
Here are some progress with Planetary landscapes with realistic conditions; Tectonic plates create those wonderful (quite overkill) canyons, rivers, lakes and some islands but not yet mountains unfortunately, I’ll fix those later. Two Controls for overall Landmass, One controls the size of the continents and the other controls the size of the islands.
Right now I am happy with the result, I still have to work with Biomes, these includes Ice caps and Icy mountain tops. Biome Generation will be automatic by using a single modifier I will call “Planet Average Temperature”. It will generate biomes in a number of factors, Latitude, Height, Surrounding Land/water (so we wont have mini dessert islands, instead have Tropical ones)
Map Views are Color and Height for now, will also include Temperatures once Im done with Biomes.
Maps are mirrored horizontally for now, because they are projected within the planet using Equirectangular projection.
