This extremely detailed and physically accurate 3d-earth is the product of many hours of hard work. Stitching together NASA textures, creating custom shaders and setting up not only one scene, but two;

To make rendering with such detailed maps possible, I decided to create one scene for rendering the whole earth and one specially modified for closeups.

The main scene is also available in four different levels of detail. You can choose between 40k, 20k, 10k or 5k textures. If bump maps are not enough for you, you can also enable the displacement on both ground and cloud layer. Poly count can be edited.

The compontents of both scenes:

+Earth Layer (Day Surface Map and Night Surface map.)
·The Day/Sunset/Night transition is dynamicly controlled by the rotation of the sun.
·Using the custom shader nodes you can control the all ground features very easily (screenshot 1)  

+Cloud Layer
·This layer contains the clouds, it can be rotated independently.
·Using the custom shader nodes you can control the cloud features (screenshot 2)

+Atmosphere Layer
· This atmospheric layer does not use textures.
· physically accurate                                                                                                                                                   · · Using the custom shader nodes you can control the atmosphere features (screenshot 3)