procedural earth shader
Settings for the shader are pretty much self-explanatory, if you want to give the clouds the impression of moving (see the video for an example), just animate the seed value.
see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qvMEHK2BoY
for a video of the shaders capabilities.
it's the best earth i've seen in blender cause you can render it in 30 seconds (1 Frame) and the download is just 1 MB
This is very cool. I think it would be cool to also add some city lights to it. I've created some toon style planet and you can check my method for cities from it (I bet you could improve that a lot, because it seems you're a lot more experienced.) http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/84212
Thank you for sharing this. I made it to bake the ground textures to an unwrapped icosahedron to use for generating planet maps for a RPG. I think its great to be able to show this along side a full render of the world.
This is one of the most brilliant shaders I've seen. Excellent work, thanks.