The traditional way to create clouds for a CG Earth is create a spherical shell slightly larger than the Earth itself, then mapping a cloud texture onto the transparency channel. As you an imagine, this technique works well for long shots in which the whole Earth is visible, but not so good for close ups and oblique camera angles:
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| Plain clouds texture mapped onto a flat, transparent layer |
As always, adding a little procedural noise to a texture pattern can enhance the detail and quality of an image based texture:
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| Same flat cloud layer with noise patterns added |
The final step would be to add displacement so that the clouds do not appear like a completely flat layer:
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| Add a little displacement into the mix to make things look more natural |
This technique will hold for medium to long shot, but will completely fall apart if the camera gets too close. Here are some more shots to test how far this technique can be pushed:
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