two nodes setups to create virtually any telluric planet surface, with cloud cover.
that's quite basic and is just all about playing with noise at different scales : first you need to generate a black & white mask to represent sea/land, let say the white is the sea and the black is the land, you then use this mask to blend to surface shaders, one for the sea (just a diffuse+glossy and a noise texture as bump), and one for the land (for this one i used 2 diffuse shaders mixed with a noise texture) The clouds is a diffuse and a transparent shader mixed by a noise texture amplified with a contrast/brightness node to simulate the cover, and a noise texture as bump to give the clouds a bit of depth. this is the theory, but it took me lots of evenings to put all this together and have an acceptable result.
Thanks, unixseb, with this explanation - together with the nodes of the delivered blend - it should be possible for me to do a similar planet, thank you very much.
thanks, a cool thing with it : unwrap the shpere with a spherical mapping (from front view) and you can bake tileable planetary maps :)
thanks for the Planet I'm using it in my video/short film here is the first 17 seconds http://youtu.be/cs1Dyym2vUo
Very nice upload, thank you very much.
A tutorial about making of this would be extremely appreciated...!