Please Note: These are retroactive posts to show history and progress.

Progress Update 4/23-24/2016:
– Added Spec to Earth
– Added Cloud Shadows
NOTE: (this is faked with another material running parrallel with the clouds and closer to the surface. Looks good from many angles, but some angles it looks like a distortion or fuzzy effect which I wanna fix)
– Added Outter Atmosphere

NOTES: So there’s a few things
1) I’m still not 100% happy with the Clouds. In the material, I’m jacking the opacity to 3x so I can see them on the dark side of Earth. With this jacked opacity, I am seeing the clouds on the light side kind of look cartoony
2) The shadows are a higher opacity than I would like. I liked seeing the 0.99 opacity on the ground instead rather than >=1.0 opacity. I felt like I had to do this to see more of the shadows, but maybe I have to change the shadow texture to exaggerate the clouds a bit so I can see them better.
3) The fresnel and the Atmosphere fog needs more work. I need to find a way to have a sort of volumetric fog effect or some sort of gradient falloff from the atmosphere. The problem currently is that the Fresnel is easy to setup with the gradient pointed toward the planet, but not away from the planet. I need to figure out some sort of spherical falloff that faces outward.
See reference pic

Edit 4/24/2016: So I found an interesting shader to try out….

The Eclipse shader
– All credit goes to JBaldwin on the Unreal Forums
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?10215-Planetary-atmosphere-shader&p=77125&viewfull=1#post77125http://

And it totally worked with the sun direction…