Photo-realistic Earth - Maya Tutorial - Part 2 - Clouds & Atmosphere

11.Duplicate your polygon sphere (earth) and rename it clouds, enlarge by 0.5. Create a lambert, a bump map and an image file. Plug the cloud transparency map into the image file and the image file into the lambert transparency. Change the bump map settings so it looks like a fluffy cloud and plug the bump map into the lambert bump. Your clouds should no be looking pretty cloud like.

12.Now it's time to create the atmosphere, start by duplicating the clouds polygon sphere and expand by 1, e atmosphere_out. For the outer atmosphere you will need a sampler info node, ramp and a lambert. Plug the sampler info node facing ratio into the ramp V.coord within UV.coord. Set the Ramp to grey and white as in the third picture down. This acts as transparency (black would be loads of colour, white is none.) Change the colour of the lambert to a light blue and diffuse to 0.8 and glow intensity to 0.5 under special effects.

13.Duplicate the atmosphere_out rename atmosphere_in, make two ramp shaders and a lambert rename one ramp shader atmos_colour and the atmos_transparency., rename the lambert atmosphere_in_shader. Plug the atmos_colour in to the the lambert colur and the the atmos_trans into the transparency. Adjust the colour and the transparency as shown in the bottom two pictures.