Edit: Heres an alternate link if the images don’t load:
http://www.stormpages.com/madcow/new_gallery/planets.htm
First one is an old pic that I updated:
The second is a test of a new planetary texture Im working on, and the clouds are procedural, you should see them animated, they look fantastic!
And a closeup view:
Those are incredible! :o
Yet another great peice of work 
Good on ya
dante
Good work.
On the third one, though, even if I can’t figure out which country I’m looking at (I turned my monitor upside down, but nothing helps :)) the “coast” is slightly too harsh. I mean maybe you should soften the edge of earth parts. But it’s just my point of view.
See you
-IS-
Your not looking at any country, this isn’t earth – Merely a earth like planet that I created…
And yeah, maybe the bump is too harsh, but I like it like this. 
Wow man!
Amazing!
Giba
Great renders, I like them. 8)
none of them show for me… 
neither
the reblended server seems to have a few problems everyonce in a while… give it a few hours
Dammit, I’ll have to provide an alternate link for the images, check the first post.
hey madcow! those pics are really sweet… the rings on the first planet are sooooo nice looking, very smooth and stylish, but i think the planet could use some more detail, looks a bit too smooth and plain
the second planets textures are really wonderful, very detailed and beleivable… great scenes and great atmosphere around the planet… i think the stars are a bit too big and too few, but they could be jsut close to the planets =) im just used to staring at tiny stars, seems natural for me
perfect texture on the moon too, well done
i agree a little about the harsh coast though on the planet, but im sure some planet somewhere has some sharp coasts… i only found them sharp in the closeup though, the far out view looked looked nice
great work!
wow, very impressive but i worked out whats wrong with the bump, the whole country is raised, not mountains and valleys. the coastline is not all cliffs 
its very cool, but making a custom NOR map will make it that much better.
:o They look great ! Many questions :
Where do you get started making a planet texture ??
How do you make the rings look so…well, soft ? Is that post production of some kind ?
You say the procedural clouds can be animated - how can you do this if they’re mapped onto a sphere ? I know it’s easy with the z-offset on a plane…but I can’t see how you’d do that on a sphere. Unless they are non-blender clouds of some sort ?
looks great!!!
maybe a little cold for an earth clone though…
mmm…snowy…
Planet Texture: Heres a hint – Terragen/Photoshop, I might do a little mini tute later, depends on how tired I am… 
And procudural textures can be mapped onto any surface, thats the beauty of them…as for the animation of them, it’s just a case of animating the texture chanel that they inhabit.
But you are right about them being non Blender clouds tho’, the default blender clouds do not bump right, I used the T_clouds plugin.
GFX Idiot:
Your so right about my lazy ass bump mapping, well spotted
Wow… good job. I think it would be great to see this animated (hint hint).
I would look into adding more stars and the thing GFXIdiot said about the bump on the coastlines. Aside from that, I’m pretty impressed. I do have one question, the space-cloud stuff on the first pic (the one with the rings); is that in the foreground or background? It works well either way, but if it’s in the foreground, I’d be interested in knowing how you did that.
terragen…+photoshop…
same thing I do…LOL. takes practice making the colors right though. but once you do…its a BREEZE. takes about an hour to make a 8000x8000 res image, strech it, and voila…planet.
Ah…pesky 8k textures, blender crashes when I try to render them with oversampling. Drat !
About the procedurals, I meant what is it you animate ? You just move them around, as with on a plane, or animate the alpha or what ?
Love the work!
PLEASE do a tutorial sometime soon. There’s been several people who have started and not finished and published them!